Jonathan Revusky wrote:
> 
> I know that perl automatically coerces numbers into strings in these 
> spots, and I recognize that it "works" as far as that goes.
> 
> However, that does not tend in any way to alter my opinion that it's a 
> terrible idea.

Yeah, but it works so well in Perl that nobody cares that
it's a bad idea (like a lot of stuff in Perl).
(I don't follow perl-dev or whatever, maybe it's actually
a big issue for them.) And Perl does have different operators
for numbers and strings which makes things clearer.

Auto-coercing strings to numbers could contribute to Velocity's
usability rather than having to use syntax like

 #set ($foo = 42)
 $foo.parseInt($bar)

It gets quite useful when template writers can't influence
the API of the Java objects they're referencing (even via subclassing
a wrapper) and are stuck with toString() or equivalent when at
least sometimes they know the string represents a number.

Of course that still doesn't mean it's a good idea for Velocity,
and I don't immediately see where *I* would write code that
requires this coercion. :)

John Allison
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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