Allow calculation between "incompatible types" by ce options

[Extra2001]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I noticed that in the current version, collection types and numeric types are incompatible. This means that I cannot perform multiplication or addition on a collection. But in fact, such operations are possible and should not be defined as "incompatible".

In fact, this problem/request is very similar to #224 , but I have a simple transition way to solve.

Describe the solution you'd like
I hope that ce can provide an option to turn off type compatibility checking when it is initializing.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Another more elegant solution would be to make this operation type compatible. But this may be a huge amount of work.

I would be very grateful if you could add the options or solve this problem !!

[arnog]

Thanks for the suggestion!
I'm not sure that I understand it completely, though. What do you expect to happen when the type checking is disabled? Nothing? Perhaps you could give an example of an operation you're thinking of and compare the result you're getting today with the result you would expect with this option?

[Extra2001]

Thanks for the suggestion! I'm not sure that I understand it completely, though. What do you expect to happen when the type checking is disabled? Nothing? Perhaps you could give an example of an operation you're thinking of and compare the result you're getting today with the result you would expect with this option?

Thanks for your reply!

My previous statement may not be clear. I will give an example to illustrate.

When I use symbols to calculate, for example, I now have two symbols a and b, which may be numbers or vectors (lists). Therefore, I declare it after creating ce:

const ce = new ComputeEngine()
ce.declare('a', 'number | list')
ce.declare('b', 'number | list')

I want to calculate the (hadamard) product of a and b, so I construct the expression as follows:

const expr = ce.box(['Multiply', 'a', 'b'])

Then I got a MathJSON like this:

[
    "Multiply",
    [
        "Error",
        [
            "ErrorCode",
            "'incompatible-type'",
            "'number'",
            "'number | list'"
        ]
    ],
    [
        "Error",
        [
            "ErrorCode",
            "'incompatible-type'",
            "'number'",
            "'number | list'"
        ]
    ]
]

Even if I declare a, b as any, I will get the same error. In fact, the following operation is possible and works well in ce:

const boxed = ce.box(['Multiply', 2, ['List', 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]])
console.log(boxed.evaluate().toString())
// [2,4,6,8,10]
const boxed = ce.box(['Multiply', ['List', 1, 2, 3, 4, 5], ['List', 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]])
console.log(boxed.evaluate().toString())
// [1,4,9,16,25]

So I need a way to disable type checking during parse symbol here, which may help me!

[arnog]

Oh... I see.

Actually, that's a bug. The type signature of the Multiply function is (number, ...number) -> number, but it's also threadable, which means it does perform automatic broadcast on its arguments, and therefore lists are valid arguments. So the type checking should take into account the threadable attribute, and it currently doesn't. As an (ugly) temporary workaround, you could declare the variables as unknown rather than any.

[Extra2001]

Thank you very much for following up on my issue