Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!pacbell.com!ucsd!ucbvax!CS.WASHINGTON.EDU!wgg
From: wgg@CS.WASHINGTON.EDU (William Griswold)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.icon
Subject: Re: Uses of dynamic typing
Message-ID: <9011172230.AA16599@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 17 Nov 90 22:30:35 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Distribution: inet
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 25

Re: Jerry Nowlin's message

>As a side note we've just recently achieved a breakthrough at work (AT&T)
>and we're now allowed to use Icon for "real" projects.  It's great.  Our
>methodology calls for code inspections and those of us who are familiar
>with Icon initially thought Icon would be much easier to code inspect than
>C++ or C.  WRONGO!  The tie in to this subject is that dynamic typing may
>contribute to the problem.  It just seems counter intuitive that Icon would
>be harder to inspect but after our initial session that was definitely my
>impression.  I'll try to figure out why on my own but if anyone has any
>ideas throw them out.
>

To me this suggests that a language in which you could add typing information
during later phases of a project would be valuable.  Having a tool
to infer the types and insert them for you would be great, and could be
revealing in itself.  In the presence of tools like Ken Walker's Icon compiler,
this doesn't sound impractical.

This type information serves as constructive comments in the code.  Not
only does it tell a new programmer what is going on, but type violations
created by the programmer's changes to the code will signal that the changes
are outside the intents of the original implementation. 

					bill