Re: [Vala] handling of 'uchar' type

[Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

On Die, 2007-04-24 at 06:52 -0500, Michael Lawrence wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am truly excited about the Vala project. The developers are
> extremely responsive and fix many bugs immediately after they're
> reported.

Thanks :)

> Would it be possible to treat uchar more like (u)int? That is, allow
> it to be used for indexing into arrays and automatically cast literals
> in comparisons? 

Using uchar as array index should be easy to fix.

> For example:
>
> foo(uchar b) {
>   if (b > 0) {
>   }
> }
>
> Currently gives an error for the comparison of 'b' and '0' unless I
> cast 0 to uchar.

That should certainly be fixed, we'll have to check how to handle such
conversions in general.

> As an aside, it would be nice if the "if" statement would
> automatically coerce numbers to logicals (so I could say "if (b)"
> there instead of "if (b > 0)").

We don't want to allow automatic conversion from integer to boolean,
that would be error-prone and could lead to less legible code. We follow
Java and C# in that regard.

> It would also be great if Vala parsed hexadecimal literals like 0xff. 

Vala already supports hexadecimal literals. Please file a bug if there
are problems with the implementation.

Jürg