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From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Dynamic typing -- To Have and Have Not (was R
Message-ID: <614@optima.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 13 Mar 91 01:11:30 GMT
Sender: news@cs.arizona.edu
Lines: 26

In article  <25293:Mar1221:01:4491@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> Dan Bernstein writes:
]... Since most people, most of the time, seem to want to
]use statically typed values

This is open to debate.  And in any case, I claim that most people who
say they want static typing are ignorant of the alternative.  I'll bet
that programmers who have programmed equally in both types of language
will overwhelmingly prefer dynamic typing (after correcting for the
stupid syntaxes that these languages seem prone to).  I know of many
people who started out programming in C or Pascal and fell in love
with Icon when they first tried it (me for example).  I doubt there
are many cases of programmers who started out with a dynamically typed
languages and grew to prefer static typing (yes, there _are_ some
places where the first programming class uses a dynamically typed
language).

] and since compilers have an easier time
]optimizing statically typed programs than dynamically typed programs, it
]makes sense to provide static typing as the default.

Only if you are designing the language to be implemented.  If you
are designing the language to be used, then this argument fails.
--
					David Gudeman
gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
noao!arizona!gudeman