{"id":3603,"date":"2008-11-05T12:33:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-05T12:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/2008\/11\/05\/typeless-expressions-lucian-wischik\/"},"modified":"2024-07-05T14:03:57","modified_gmt":"2024-07-05T21:03:57","slug":"typeless-expressions-lucian-wischik","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/typeless-expressions-lucian-wischik\/","title":{"rendered":"Typeless expressions (Lucian Wischik)"},"content":{"rendered":"

“My dog has no type.”
“How does he smell?”
“Awful!<\/a>“<\/p>\n

Two of the new features of VB10 — array literals<\/em> and multi-line lambdas<\/em> — are interesting from the language perspective because their expressions have no type! This article is for language lawyers. I remember at my very first undergraduate computer science lecture, the lecturer Frank King<\/a> handed out the class list and asked for corrections. One student raised his hand, apologized for being pedantic, and said that his name had an “å” with a ring above it, not a plain “a”. Dr King praised him for the correction, saying “computer science needs pedants”.<\/p>\n

On my personal blog I’ve written in detail about the VB expressions that have no type<\/a>: Nothing<\/em>, Lambdas<\/em>, Array Literals<\/em>, AddressOf<\/em> and CallsToSubs<\/em>. To be pedantic, we’re not talking about “Option Strict Off”. We’re talking about strongly-typed VB, with Option Strict On, and about which type the compiler picks for these expressions. Answer: it depends on the context they’re in…<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“My dog has no type.”“How does he smell?”“Awful!“ Two of the new features of VB10 — array literals and multi-line lambdas — are interesting from the language perspective because their expressions have no type! This article is for language lawyers. I remember at my very first undergraduate computer science lecture, the lecturer Frank King handed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":260,"featured_media":8818,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,195],"tags":[99],"class_list":["post-3603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-visual-basic","tag-lucian-wischik"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

“My dog has no type.”“How does he smell?”“Awful!“ Two of the new features of VB10 — array literals and multi-line lambdas — are interesting from the language perspective because their expressions have no type! This article is for language lawyers. I remember at my very first undergraduate computer science lecture, the lecturer Frank King handed […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/260"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}