Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS @ Pike developers forum wrote:
Well, a NULL value basically has any type (in SQL). I'm not sure what would be the most natural way to extend this into Pike, but I figured that the closest we could get, was something like the code above. Since the NULL value has "any" type, it's not lying as such.
I think one should view this more from the Pike angle. If e.g. arrayp(x) is true, a pike programmer typically expects that all operators and calls for arrays would work for x. It's not possible to achieve that when x is an object (most builtin functions expecting arrays would still balk, for example). So even if you added a bunch of backtick functions it'd still not work 100%.
Ok, I see your point. I'll try and pickup the slack as soon as 7.9 sees the light and help to get this going.