streich@tigger.colorado.edu (Mark Streich) (01/12/90)
While this newsgroup seems to cover many research languages, I would like
to mention one that is used by an awful lot of people: dBASE
You don't need to declare types of variables/functions/parameters, and arrays
can be polymorphic with each element being a different type.
For example, you can write a function as follows:
function addtwo
parameters a,b
return a+b
If you call it as addtwo(1,2) you get the result 3. If you call it with
addtwo("abc","def") you get the result "abcdef".
As for arrays, you can do something like this:
dimension arr[5]
arr[1] = 1
arr[2] = 1.23
arr[3] = "abc"
arr[4] = .f. (boolean values)
arr[5] = ctod("09/07/61") (date values)
While many implementations of the language are interpreters, some are
compilers. (for DOS, Mac, Unix, Vax, etc.)
So, you see, polymorphism isn't such an ivory tower topic.