Look, I wasn’t expressing any value judgment, and I’m not advocating for implicit conversions.
My point was that the implicit conversions in PL/1 have a different context in PL/1 than they have in Perl and Javascript, more akin to the one in C. One effect of that is that the type of a variable remains fixed in PL/1 where it doesn’t in Perl and Javascript. This places it at a different point in design space and changes the dynamics to some extent, which is just a nuance that I find interesting. It wasn’t expressed in the original comment I was replying to, so I thought it would be worth pointing it out so that he distinction isn’t being missed.
So in your opinion, the PL/1 design here is closer to a trainwreck than an other trainwreck?
Furthermore C's implicit conversions come nowhere near parsing a string to get a float, that's squarely on the Perl/JS side of the board.