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From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: RE: Dynamic typing (part 31,497)
Message-ID: <1957@optima.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 15 Apr 91 23:53:37 GMT
Sender: news@cs.arizona.edu
Lines: 19

In article  <8872@skye.cs.ed.ac.uk> Nick Rothwell writes:
]
]No runtime *type* errors. Runtime errors are restricted to a small set of
]exception conditions defined by the language.

The only runtime error you have eliminated with static type checking
is a "message not understood" or "domain error".  The elimination of
this single type of error hardly seems to justify the limitations on
expressiveness -- particularily since this is the easiest type of
error to find by testing.

The only reason you can kind find type errors at compile time is
because the errors are so trivial that the test is decidable.  How
much are you willing to give up in expressiveness to find the most
trivial and obvious programming error a few minutes earlier?
--
					David Gudeman
gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
noao!arizona!gudeman