Type compatibility
As explained in Types, every expression has a type. If an expression is a variable, a constant or a parameter, its type is equal to the type of the variable, constant or parameter, of course. This topic explains what happens if an expression is composed of two subexpressions with different types.
Consider this example:
3 + 2.1
The type of “3″ is int, and the type of “2.1″ is float. The type of the resulting expression is always the “highest” type of the subexpressions. High means “most descriptive” here. For example, complex is higher than float, which is in turn higher than int (boolean expressions are treated differently). So, this means the type of the expression above must be float. Since its result should be 5.1, this behaves as you would expect.
This means, however, that “3″, a constant of type int, must be converted to “3.0″, a constant of type float. This conversion is performed automatically by the compiler. You should be aware of the fact that the compiler can only convert types to higher types. For example, it cannot convert a float to an int. So this statement is illegal and results in an error message:
int i = 3.1
Functions like round and real are available to perform these conversions manually, if this is necessary.
Be aware of the fact that some operators and most functions always return float or complex values. For example, this statement is illegal, since the division operator / cannot return an integer result (it returns 1.5):
int i = 3 / 2
You can look up the behavior of all operators and functions in the Reference section.
The compiler can convert booleans to other types and vice versa, but it does generate a warning for each conversion. The value true is converted to 1, and the value false to 0. An expression of another type (int, float or complex) is converted to false if it is equal to 0, otherwise it is converted to true. Please note that this is only supported for compatibility with old Fractint formulas. It is not recommended to use this in new formulas.
Colors cannot be converted automatically. Use the rgb, rgba, hsl, and hsla functions to convert floating-point values to colors. Use red, green, blue, hue, sat, lum, and alpha to convert colors to floating-point values.
For the type compatibility rules for classes, see Inheritance and Casting.
Next: Conditionals
See Also
Expressions
Variables