stillinbeta / friendshipismonadic Goto Github PK

This year, I decided to try Advent of Code using FiM++. I haven't finished the puzzles yet, but nonetheless i believe I have found a few minor deficiencies which would be very helpful to resolve.

Firstly, and most importantly, it would be good to be able to control which type of input I read in. Currently, the following code snippet:

Did you know that Spike was a number?
I asked Spike.

will give an error, as (currently) the 'asked' keyword causes a new variable called Spike to be declared of the appropriate type, and the user input read into this variable.

What I would like to see would be that, if Spike is already declared and has a type, then the asked keyword reads a value of that type into the variable Spike. This is useful when I expect to read in a number and the user enters '2' (currently that would be read as a character); it is vital when I wish to read in a string, as the current state of string manipulation in FiM++ (i.e. virtually nonexistent) means that if I read in a string, there is no reasonable way to split it into its composite characters; if I want to split up a string, it becomes possible if I am able to read it in character by character, and perhaps store it in a character array.

The second thing that I believe would be very useful would be implicit conversion between types. For example, if I have a character variable containing the value 'a', and I attempt to put it into a number variable, I currently get an error. I believe that it would be better if I got the value 97 (ascii value of the character 'a') and that, if I later put a number with the value 97 into a character variable, that the result is 'a'.

I do not believe that either of these tweaks would run contrary to the language specification, and they would make the language far more usable; by which I mean, it would become possible to solve Advent of Code problems without specifically editing the input file so that the data can be read in in non-string format.