Earlier you said that there would be an error message. Now you say crash. As far as I am concerned, crash has a specific meaning – a program terminating unexpectedly to the Finder, or locking up the entire machine. Displaying an error message is not a crash.
obvious to the average user
In the future, I would appreciate it if appeals to “average users” would be left out. Let other users speak for themselves. I don’t think it fosters useful discussion when mythical “average users” are invoked. That’s essentially a way to shut down discussion – how can anyone disagree with a faceless “average user”? Each person on this forum is entitled to their own opinion, but no one is entitled to speak for anyone else.
So having said that I am only entitled to speak for my own opinion, I will now violate that rule by attempting to speak for you (Michael), by trying to summarize what you are saying. I believe your opinion is that in ALL situations where text is required, Panorama should automatically convert a number to text. More specifically, in this instance you wish that arraystrip
would convert numbers to text automatically.
In this regard, Panorama 6 (and earlier) was very consistent – it would NEVER automatically convert text to a number, it would always stop the program with a type mismatch error, you had to use str( functions everywhere.
Panorama X is not as consistent – it does the conversion in all the common cases, but not in all cases, especially not cases where it seemed to me that passing a number was a definite mistake. To me, arraystrip is a case where passing a number would almost always be a mistake, but you have provided an example where it was not a mistake.
It might be reasonable to decide that Panorama X should always do the conversion. I’m not sure, if a lot of thought is put into it perhaps a case can be made that this is not always the best option. Either way, I’m not going to embark on a project to make it always convert numbers to text any time soon. It’s not just a question of flipping a line or two of code – it takes specific code added in every single spot where text is expected. It could take weeks to do that comprehensively. In my opinion, that would not be a wise allocation of resources.