Meaning of 'type-safe'??

gobby

what does the term 'type-safe' refer to when talking about collections in microsoft visual c++ (6.0)??

cheers...

edit: for example, when talking about lists, arrays, or maps.

Typedef

It means you pay me homage, with trinkets, small gifts, shiny metalic objects called tender, sisters &/or small furry animals.

Stark

It means you define a variable to explicity hold data of one type and it can't store anything but that type of data (mostly).

For example in a language like php which isn't type-safe you can have
$p = "hello"
$p = 123;

Whereas say in Java you have

String s;
s="Hello";
s = 123 (can't do this).

Well technically that's strong-typing but I think type-safe is roughly the same thing.

If it's type-safe you can also only perform actions on a data type which were meant for that data-type. For example if you're collect has a String in a[1] and an Integer in a[2] then you can do a[1].length() but not a[2].length()

gobby

that seems to make sense stark, cheers.

typedef, trinkets are on their way. no sisters im afraid so im sending you a yak.

bonkey

Theres a nice, short explanation of type-safe here

jc

gobby

Originally posted by bonkey
Theres a nice, short explanation of type-safe here

jc

cheers jc...