Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!mintaka!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!ai-lab!ai.mit.edu!tmb From: tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional Subject: Re: A question about types in ML Message-ID: <11937@life.ai.mit.edu> Date: 17 Nov 90 00:20:04 GMT References: <4906@rex.cs.tulane.edu> Sender: news@ai.mit.edu Reply-To: tmb@ai.mit.edu Distribution: comp Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 10 In article , peterson-john@cs.yale.edu (John C. Peterson) writes: |> Regarding typing in Common Lisp & ML, it is incorrect to say that |> Common Lisp lacks types; type declarations in CL are actually far more |> general than those in ML. What Common Lisp lacks is any sort of well |> defined type inference, a major deficiency. I didn't say that "CL lacks types", but that it does not have support for "handling typing". The fact that you can declare very general types that the compiler cannot possibly check at compile time is one indication of the problem. Sorry if I was imprecise.