Re: Bug: Babel: asymptote: erroneous conversion of heterogeneous-typed table

[Eric Schulte <schulte.eric@gmail.com>]

András Major <andras.g.major@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Eric,
>
>> Given that asymptote can not make use of heterogeneous tables, it seems
>> that it would be easiest to simply silently converted any table
>> containing a single string element to a table of all strings.  I've just
>> applied your previous patch (thanks for the patch!).  If this proves
>> confounding in the future we can always revisit the decision.
>
> I've been away since my last post and now you've already applied a patch
> -- wow!  Here's another thought though: change the behaviour of the :var
> header argument such that you can specify a range of rows, columns, or
> a rectangle just like in table references.

This is already possible, see "Indexable variable values" [1].

> I agree that wildly mixing cell types in a table should be a felony,
> but "mixing" them the way I'd like to makes perfect sense.  You would
> then simply make more than one :var to specify multiple subtables,
> each with its own type.  I think this might be better than
> brute-forcing everything to string just so that the asymptote program
> has to parse the values back to numbers.
>
> What do you think?
>

I must admit by the time I got to this thread is was already many
messages deep, and I haven't read the initial messages, so I don't know
what your way of mixing was, but from my current understanding of
asymptote the behavior implemented by Nick's patch seems to make the
most sense, in that it allows tables of ints and floats, but when a
single string is present it converts the table to all strings.

Best -- Eric

>
>   András
>
>
>


Footnotes: 
[1]  http://orgmode.org/manual/var.html

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/