[offtopic] marshalling

[Al B. Snell]

On Thu, 4 Jan 2001 linas@linas.org wrote:

> but I was thinking of something more mundane, like perl.  In perl,
> which is untyped, you have to treat any value as if it were a
> string, float, or int, all at the same time.  If the user wants
> to multiply by two, and then concatenate it to a string, and then
> call it, you have to convert types on the fly.  That means in the VM, 
> your basic datatype has to be all three, and a flag value saying 
> with of the three is the current 'right' value.   But for java, 
> this would be stupid.  So the java vm guy would be 'what's all 
> this crud in the VM'? and the perl guy is 'we can't live without 
> it, its fundamental'.

No, Perl and Java use the same basic model of tagged types. The presence
of implicit casts can be made VM-independent.

> 
> --linas
> 

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software