[Info-vax] basic BASIC question

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Thu, 6 Feb 2025 11:04:12 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> If JavaScript was unique in the web frontend world for lack of type
> safety, then the lack of type safety could be due to its history.
> Other popular languages like PHP and Python also has a relaxed
> approach to types.

Worth being clear what we’re talking about. None of these languages is 
type-unsafe in the way that C, for example, allows free typecasting 
between unrelated types, and in particular between pointers to unrelated 
types. They are all dynamic languages, and every value that a variable can 
hold does have an explicit type, and conversions between types follow 
well-founded semantic rules.

However, JavaScript and PHP have a laissez-faire attitude to equivalences 
with strings, and will happily autoconvert between strings and non-string 
types in various situations, often leading to surprising results. This is 
why both those languages have the “===” comparison operator as a stricter 
form of “==” which says “turn off these string-nonstring autoconversions”.

Python never had this particular bit of brain damage. But it does still 
have that common weakness with booleans. Which is a more manageable issue.