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

[Nicolas Goaziou <n.goaziou@gmail.com>]

Hello,

Eric Schulte <schulte.eric@gmail.com> writes:

> I don't know asymptote well enough to know if you would /always/ want a
> heterogeneous table to be converted to all strings, or if there would
> ever be a case where you would want mixed types in a table.

There are no mixed types arrays in Asymptote, hence the problem of the
OP. You can choose between int[][], real[][] or string[][] (and other
types specific to Asymptote and, as such, irrelevant here), but you
never want an heterogeneous table.

So, the real question is: what should Org do when an user tries to fit
a mixed array into an Asymptote var? Until now, it was throwing an
error. With this patch, _one_ string in the table will trigger the
string type for every other cell.

But this kind of an hidden feature. The user has to be aware that, under
some circumstances, ints in his table will become strings.

On the other hand, an user knowing he can't mix types in Asymptote (as
he should) can't do much about it, as far as I know.

As I said in this thread, an elegant solution would be to have a way to
specify Babel to output tables of strings easily:

| x | "1" | "2" | "3" |
| y | "1" | "4" | "9" |

That would be the less surprising, as the user would get the type he
sees in his table.


Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Goaziou