Different ways of doing type checks and contracts

[cosmos]

Edit: Just realised this was posted in the wrong forum! I guess the Mods will move it to either "AutoIt General Help and Support" or "AutoIt Technical Discussion".

Do you use type checking? Or do you choose not to type check?

I was trying to think of the simplest way to do a type check without typing arguments more than once and I came up with:

Func displayPerson($firstName, $lastName, $age)
  ; -- TYPE CHECK --
  Local $typeCheck = ("" _
    & IsString($firstName) _
    & IsString($lastName) _
    & IsNumber($age) _
  )
  If (StringInStr($typeCheck, "0")) Then MsgBox(16, "Type Error: displayPerson()", $typeCheck)

  ; -- FUNCTION --
  MsgBox(0, "", $firstName & " " & $lastName & " (" & $age & ")")
EndFunc

The only catch with this method is that it produces a very simplistic error message. Even still, the fact that you only have to type out arguments once makes it a reasonable approach, in my opinion. The same logic can also be used for making function contracts (for example: $firstName mustn't be an empty string etc...).

What do you think? How do you go about such things?

Edited May 30, 2017 by Melba23
Moved

[jchd]

My preference is to let the automatic string <--> number conversions act as much as possible, of course unless the expected datatype is mandatory (array having this-that dimension, object, map, dllstruct, ...)

If a given parameter is expected and used as a number in a function, passing a string containing a number is harmless and can save cycles. Vice-versa: number --> string is pretty common and also harmless.

Type checking is one thing, but domain checking is another. I think the burden of supplying correct arguments in both type and value must be supported by the caller, not the callee, just because it's at this point you can do something: at the callee stage, you just can error out and emergency stop.

Edited May 30, 2017 by jchd