Perhaps a bad idea, but at least it was rigorously specified. I note that that Javascript and perl have same ability. See also https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
And it’s widely considered horrible.
That is orthogonal to the issue at hand.
> Weak/strong typing and dynamic/static typing are different axes.
And perl and javascript have both, and the weak typing is what gets criticised the most, and what causes the most issues.
So in your opinion, the PL/1 design here is closer to a trainwreck than an other trainwreck?
Furthermore C's implicit conversions come nowhere near parsing a string to get a float, that's squarely on the Perl/JS side of the board.
My point was that the implicit conversions in PL/1 have a different context in PL/1 than they have in Perl and Javascript, more akin to the one in C. One effect of that is that the type of a variable remains fixed in PL/1 where it doesn’t in Perl and Javascript. This places it at a different point in design space and changes the dynamics to some extent, which is just a nuance that I find interesting. It wasn’t expressed in the original comment I was replying to, so I thought it would be worth pointing it out so that he distinction isn’t being missed.