When using .add() with a string and a number, automatically coerce the number to string

[thelinuxlich]

r(1).add("1") // "11", like JS behavior

or have a special method .concat()?

[danielmewes]

This sounds very reasonable to me. We will include this in the next RQL_proposal discussion period.

[coffeemug]

I personally don't think it's a good idea. For example, should the value here be 2 or 11? What about r('1').add(1)?

I think people should coerce types explicitly.

[deontologician]

I think coercion of numbers to strings in javascript is a huge mis-feature that we shouldn't replicate. Having a string formatting term would be better in my opinion

[mlucy]

I don't think we should do this, personally. I second what @deontologician said about adding a string formatting command.

[danielmewes]

Ok I can see that supporting this can be dangerous.
I think having a special concat term would be reasonable generally, but on the other hand the difference between that term and add would be difficult to explain since it's so small. So in the end I think that would be a bad idea as well.

I don't understand how a string formatting term is related to this though? You can already coerce the number to a string.

[deontologician]

Because usually the reason you'd want to take advantage of auto-coercion is in code like:

r.expr("I have").add(x).add(" cookies and ").add(y).add(" brownies")

where coercions would be really verbose. (Though without overloaded operators in js, it's pretty verbose even with auto-coercion.)

[deontologician]

something like:

r.format("I have {} cookies and {} brownies", x, y)

would be much nicer

[danielmewes]

I see, thanks for explaining.
@thelinuxlich is the use case you had for this originally something that would be addressed by a format term?

[deontologician]

For posterity, #3353 is the string formatting issue

[thelinuxlich]

Yes, r.format would be nice!

[mlucy]

@danielmewes, could we close this in favor of #3353?

[danielmewes]

I'd like to wait until the end of the ReQL discussion period on Monday. I'll close it then.

[danielmewes]

Closing. We'll later implement a formatting term instead.