Mixing strings and numbers

[Steve Heller <steve@...>]

Hi all,

I have a problem with Lua code that I am generating
from an existing scripting language that has no notion
of type checking. The problem is in code like this:

if X ~= "" or X == 0 then X = 3 end

Obviously this isn't going to be legal in Lua, since X
cannot be both a string and a number at the same time.
Can anyone suggest a way for me to handle this
automatically? There are hundreds of these statements
that need to be maintained while we are converting our
system from the existing scripting language to Lua.

Thanks.