Why Would a Random Integer be converted to Float?

[Gil Creque]

I'm using the built in count and random integer blocks and for some reason when the random int is used in the count block it gets converted to a float. I'm not sure why it would do that. Is there a workaround?

https://blockly-demo.appspot.com/static/demos/code/index.html#v23oqu

[Neil Fraser]

The reason for converting the endpoints of the loop to a number is that the loop was so that if those values are strings, they ought to still function as expected.

This mirrors the JavaScript approach of automatically casting values to a reasonable type.  And since loops can be incremented by non-integer values, floats are needed over ints.  Without those float() casts, the above blocks would throw TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "float") to str

However, literally none of the other blocks implement similar type casting.  Such as:

Furthermore, our style guide specifically states that we should generate clean code, and that we shouldn't attempt to make consistent execution across different languages.  It is clear to me that we are out of spec here.

I propose dropping the float() functions from the Python generator for this loop block.  A quick scan of the codebase doesn't reveal any similar cases.

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Neil Fraser
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[Neil Fraser]

The PR for resolving this is here:

https://github.com/google/blockly/pull/6259