On September 22, 2005 11:41 PM M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > Bill Page worte: > > In a sense, Axiom is/was an experiment in the application of > > strongly typed programming languages in computer algebra and > > to be quite honest and blunt, for the most part the experiment > > seems to have failed. :(
> Martin Rubey wrote: > > No, most of it has been transformed into MuPad. However, I > > dare say that Aldor is superiour to MuPad's language. > > C Y wrote: > > I think the jury is still out on strongly typed issues - such > > systems (including Axiom, in some ways) tend to be designed > > by experts for experts, and thus it is not surprising that in > > terms of "market share" they don't do as well. I suspect core > > technical merit has little to do with such issues, which is > > quite unfortunate. M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > > That battle is raging right now in the web development arena, > and "strongly typed" and "static" languages are taking a beating > by dynamic environments like Ruby, Python, Perl and PHP. Let's > face it ... people who program for a living like dynamic languages > and hate static ones. If the "industry" couldn't hire thousands > of inexpensive C programmers, the language would have died out > except as an "assembler" for dynamic language interpreters and > the Linux kernel. :) We need to define carefully what we mean by "stongly typed" programming language. I think this article does a good job: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongly-typed_programming_language and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datatype "Static typing as opposed to dynamic typing. In a static type system, type annotations are associated with variable names rather than values. It is thus possible for the compiler to prove via static analysis that a program contains no type errors." "Strong guarantees about the run-time behavior of a program before program execution, whether provided by static analysis or another mechanism." So one issue is really statically typed versus dynamically typed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typed_and_untyped_languages The C language is statically typed but not strong. Haskell and Ocaml are strongly static typed. I think SPAD and Aldor are also strong static typed languages. (However I am not so sure about the 'pretend' construct in these languages which looks something like a type-cast in C.) Languages like Python, Lisp, Maple and are dynamnically typed. I think that MuPad is also dynamically typed. Comments? Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
