> Is there any way for us developers to influence this decision making process? Yes. Check out the Community section of http://www.ecmascript.org/ > What is the current position this committee holds? I'm not sure what you mean by this. I believe the committee is an official committee of Ecma International (http://www.ecma-international.org/ <http://www.ecma-international.org/> ), "an industry association founded in 1961, dedicated to the standardization of information and communication systems." I don't know how the committee members are selected, or how the committee's recommendations get officially ratified by Ecma.
> What do other languages do? Before I started programming in ActionScript, my background was in C++. Types like int, float, double, and bool aren't nullable in C++. I'm not a Java programmer, but I think Java has a primitive types like int which aren't nullable and wrapper classes like Int (i.e., new Int(3)) which are. I don't know how these interconvert, but I'm sure some Java programmer on this list can tell us. I don't know what C# does. > Is it possible to make a Non-primitive extension type of a nullable int, Number, Boolean in future releases (thus remaining true to the current way of doing things, but still leaving some room for developers)? I think this is what Java does, and ECMAScript could presumably do something similar. Check out the committee's wiki to see whether they've thought about this. - Gordon ________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of supertodda Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2007 7:41 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [flexcoders] Re: nulling primitive data types - Is there any way for us developers to influence this decision making process? - What is the current position this committee holds? - What do other languages do? - Is it possible to make a Non-primitive extension type of a nullable int, Number, Boolean in future releases (thus remaining true to the current way of doing things, but still leaving some room for developers)? We use some VOs in Caringorm to handle some sql result sets when we found out that an int column with the value of null came back as 0 in flex. This puts us in the position to either make all VO variables of type String (problems because 1- the int/Boolean is not a string and 2- hard to work with strings as int/Boolean) or scrap VOs all together in favor of using regular objects (error prone, not typed, no auto complete in flex builder, etc.). As far as I know, the idea of "not yet determined" and 0 are not equal. Reminds me of Schrodinger's Cat. Some part of me cares what is "right", but mostly I just want it to work without hacking both flex and server ends. Thanks. --- In [email protected] <mailto:flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> , "Gordon Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > BTW... Adobe is on this committee along with other companies. Our plan > is to adopt what they decide, but to influence the decision process. If > they go for nullable types, you'll get nullable types. If they don't, > you won't. We're taking language compliance seriously. > > - Gordon > > ________________________________ > > From: [email protected] <mailto:flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> [mailto:[email protected] <mailto:flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> ] On > Behalf Of Gordon Smith > Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2007 1:22 PM > To: [email protected] <mailto:flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> > Subject: RE: [flexcoders] nulling primitive data types > > > > I believe the committee defining the next version of Ecmascript is > considering support for nullable and non-nullable types. > > - Gordon >
