Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!udel!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!fuug!news.funet.fi!tukki.jyu.fi!sakkinen From: sakkinen@tukki.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Dynamic typing (part 3) Message-ID: <1991Mar13.143805.28242@tukki.jyu.fi> Date: 13 Mar 91 14:38:05 GMT References: <613@optima.cs.arizona.edu> Reply-To: sakkinen@jytko.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen) Organization: University of Jyvaskyla, Finland Lines: 34 In article <613@optima.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes: >In article Peter da Silva writes: >]In article <602@optima.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes: >]> Now people have actually come to believe, against all >]> evidence, that static typing is important for program reliability. >] >]No, they believe that dynamic typing imposes a certain unavoidable runtime >]overhead, and aren't willing to pay that cost. > >You haven't been following the thread. Only one person of all that >replied has mentioned the overhead. Everyone else is worried that >types errors aren't detected by the compiler. BTW, I mentioned the >high overhead in my first posting on the subject. Your original statement would seem to refer to people (programmers, managers who decide upon programming languages, etc.) in general, not only us Usenet freaks who are taking part in this illustrious thread of discussion. Surely at least Peter da Silva meant it that way, and I think very often the reason he suggested is the most important one. Just think about "typical" C hackers. Although C has some degree of static typing, they could not care less for "program reliability". On the other hand, they easily get mad about any byte of runtime overhead that might want to creep into their objects. The same horror of overhead seems to be common even among C++ programmers. Markku Sakkinen Department of Computer Science and Information Systems University of Jyvaskyla (a's with umlauts) PL 35 SF-40351 Jyvaskyla (umlauts again) Finland SAKKINEN@FINJYU.bitnet (alternative network address)