COMPARE() (was Re: browse keys (@bk))

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 12:49:39AM -0400, Kenneth Brody wrote:
> Fairlight wrote:
> [...]
> > I probably tried an arithmetic function improperly in the past and assumed
> > it couldn't be done at all.  I'm used to the old "it either evaluates to
> > true or it doesn't, and anything non-zero is true" results from many other
> > languages.
> [...]
> 
> Well, one could argue that these other languages are deficient in that
> they don't have a boolean type, and so they must resort to defaulting
> to "not equals zero" for true/false.  ;-)
> 
> Of course, how would you handle non-numeric types?  What does "if: @TD"
> mean?

IMSMHTUO, the suggestion at the root of this is "whenever a sane
definition for an automatic typecast exists, make it".  The output of
COMPARE can be *interpreted* as a boolean: 0=true, non-0=false.

So why not let it be used that way if the user doesn't care which one's
higher, without making them type the extra characters?  Yeah, I know,
filePro isn't perl.  :-}

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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