change string into an integer

[David McFarlane]

Michiel Spape wrote:
>2. Attributes themselves are like (or just are?) variants, which 
>VisualBasic slightly awkwardly casts depending on their value.

Just on that point, context attributes are not variants, they are 
always just ordinary strings.  But do not take my word for that, if 
you run the following code in any inline,

     c.SetAttrib "MyAttrib", 0
     MsgBox TypeName( c.GetAttrib("MyAttrib") )

the message box will indicate that MyAttrib has the type "String", no 
matter what you put in for the value of the attribute.

That said, Visual Basic (and hence E-Basic) will attempt to cast the 
attribute to an appropriate type as it gets used.  E.g., both

     c.SetAttrib "MyAttrib", 1
     MsgBox 2 + TypeName( c.GetAttrib("MyAttrib") )

and

     c.SetAttrib "MyAttrib", 1
     MsgBox TypeName( c.GetAttrib("MyAttrib") ) + 2

produce the numeric result 3, whereas

     c.SetAttrib "MyAttrib", 1
     MsgBox "2" + TypeName( c.GetAttrib("MyAttrib") )

produces the string "21", and

     c.SetAttrib "MyAttrib", 1
     MsgBox TypeName( c.GetAttrib("MyAttrib") ) + 2

produces the string "12".

So it is a safer practice to always explicitly cast attributes to the 
desired type, e.g.

iValue = CInt( c.GetAttrib("MyAttrib") )

-- dkm

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