It may solve your immediate problem. But it's dangerous - there are too many hidden gotchas and situations where you have to know the actual implementation (which can change) to know what it does. It also breaks a lot of conventions established by most other languages, so you really have to be really careful when assuming that "this probably works like I expect" - you may get nasty surprises). Ohh and it's pretty slow compared to other languages (like C++, Lua & Python - just to name a few). And that's not even mentioning the fact that the people implementing it seem to be a case of the "blind leading the blind". Just search for how they tried to fix an integer overflow by testing if "foo>intmax" etc - that's just the tip of the iceberg (who the hell thought that converting strings to integers before comparing them was a good idea?) etc etc. Those guys should not be allowed near language design. So yeah; it's pretty bad.