Re: [Monotone-devel] Making vocab-from-string constructors explicit?

[Zack Weinberg]

On 1/25/07, Timothy Brownawell <address@hidden> wrote:
> The purpose of our vocab system is to provide some amount of type
> safety. This is somewhat defeated by having the vocab-from-string
> constructors not be explicit, there are a number of places that simply
> use () to allow use of a variable with a type that doesn't match. I'd
> like to make the constructors for this explicit, to make this practice
> slightly more annoying to do and much easier to recognize (both for
> whover writes it, and anyone who looks at it later).
>
> Does anyone have (good) reasons not to do this? I think it'd help us
> keep the code clean.

I tried to do this once before.  I found some real, if probably
harmless, bugs doing it (things being converted to types they honestly
weren't) and I think it's a great idea, but I gotta warn you that the
fallout will be immense.  I gave up on it just because it was too much
work.

zw