>Not according to the compiler. Anything can become anything else.
You mind clarifying that? I constantly have compile-time errors from type mismatches. You can cast a variable to a different type, but you can do that in any language.
you can't implicitly convert a char to an int, your compiler will take that as a fatal error. About the closest you could get is char and short since they're essentially the same data type, but even then the compiler might throw an error over an implicit conversion.
That said, JavaScript doesn't have types at all, really. Every type can be implicitly converted to another type, and yet Node is still used server side.
> You mind clarifying that? I constantly have compile-time errors from type mismatches. You can cast a variable to a different type, but you can do that in any language.
Well, for one people overload types. The practice of, for example, using return codes as error values. The second problem is unions. They exist to make people converting bytestreams into structures happier, but often get misused elsewhere.
And void* is essentially a black hole, but it's a very common black hole to see in programs.
> That said, JavaScript doesn't have types at all, really. Every type can be implicitly converted to another type, and yet Node is still used server side.
Yeah and that's the most solid criticism against it! While it's true that it's quite a bit more difficult to cause fatal errors in a program in node, the language does little to help you solve these problems once you expose that functionality to it.
That's why Typescript has been doing so well, I think. It's consuming the javascript ecosystem faster than anything I've ever seen, and having written a fair sum of it (for a server side application, no less) I'm constantly surprised how capable it is.
And of course, I'm on record as a big fan of Purescript and Elm, with more bias towards the former.
You mind clarifying that? I constantly have compile-time errors from type mismatches. You can cast a variable to a different type, but you can do that in any language.
you can't implicitly convert a char to an int, your compiler will take that as a fatal error. About the closest you could get is char and short since they're essentially the same data type, but even then the compiler might throw an error over an implicit conversion.
That said, JavaScript doesn't have types at all, really. Every type can be implicitly converted to another type, and yet Node is still used server side.