December 2009
Intermediate to advanced
380 pages
9h 2m
English
| Pattern 21 | Automatic Type Promotion |
This pattern describes how to automatically and safely promote arithmetic operand types.
The goal of automatic type promotion is to get all operands of a single operation to be of the same type or compatible types. That’s just how computer CPU instructions want their operands. Unfortunately, that’s fairly inconvenient from a programming point of view. We often want to use a variety of types within the same operation such as 3+’0’. Most programming languages would, for example, interpret 3+’0’ as 3+(int)’0’.
A language application can convert between types at will as long as it doesn’t lose information. For example, we can convert 4 to 4.0 but can’t convert 4.5 to integer 4 without losing information. ...