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From: cs450a03@uc780.umd.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: RE: Dynamic typing (part 3)
Message-ID: <19MAR91.23112265@uc780.umd.edu>
Date: 19 Mar 91 23:11:22 GMT
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David Gudeman writes:

>In article  <28149@dime.cs.umass.edu> victor yodaiken writes:
>]
>]I'm not at all sure that type determination is always something that one
>]can entrust to a compiler. 
> 
>I wasn't advocating that.  In most dynamically typed languages the
>compiler has no idea what the type of anything is.  The programmer
>knows the types and, where it isn't obvious, he should document the
>types.  There is no reason (other than efficiency) that he should be
>required to specify the type to the compiler.

On the other hand, I was.  At least for those cases where it's clear cut.  

I know that it's usually clear cut for the code I write.  Generally
it's pretty clear what I'm doing, at least in the sense of what type
something should be.  But I'm allowed to stick in declarations for the
cases where the compiler's type inference gets hopelessly lost, and
there's a lot of information it just ignores (*sigh*).

I've been working on collecting ideas and information for the last two
or three years... lots of it goes into coding style, but eventually I
hope to make a compiler which lives up to what I think's possible.
Since I'm not working on it for real, yet, I just do things like annoy
you guys with what's possible but poorly implemented...  (And I have
yet to come up with very elegant ways of representing this sort of
information... I'm afraid that if I were to start working on it now
it'd be one god-awful huge compiler.)

The confessions of a wanna-be 8-)  (It would make my job easier,
though, if someone ELSE were to do this...)

Raul Rockwell