@bstorer said:@boh said: What's up with this, do they teach students nowadays that all datatypes except "string" are evil and bad, and need to be converted to strings at the first opportunity? Exactly when did this ToString() idiocy start? I blame Java, but this evil seems to have spread to just about every language by now. It seems to me that many of the WTF:s we see nowadays contain something along the line of "(Val( (Val(a.ToString) + Val(b.ToString)).ToString ) * Val(c.ToString)).ToString" instead of "(a+b)*c". Can we just start a movement to stop this madness now? How else do you propose to work with data stored only in VARCHAR(255) columns in the database? I blame web developers and the endemic use of XML.