Aucbvax.5031
fa.editor-p
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!editor-people
Mon Nov  9 10:29:05 1981
Re: Strong typing is bad for you.
>From research!dbm@Berkeley Mon Nov  9 09:55:20 1981
There are strongly typed languages which allow one to define
"polymorphic" functions like MAPCAR and MEMBER.  The outstanding
example is ML, the metalanguage (i.e. command and programming
language) of the Edinburgh LCF system.  ML has the pleasant property
of being strongly typed without requiring the programmer to declare
the types of variables -- the typechecking algorithm "deduces" the most
general type for any expression or definition the user types in.  For
MAPCAR, this would be (* -> **) -> list * -> list **.

ML is described in a paper by Gordon, et. al. in the 1978 POPL Proceedings,
and more fully in "Edinburgh LCF", by Gordon, Milner, and Wadsworth, 
LNCS Vol. 78.  It is an interactive, incremental, "extensible" language
like Lisp.