From: Aaron Sherman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 22:00:15 -0500
On Tue, 2005-02-22 at 19:32 -0500, Bob Rogers wrote: > The type safe programming languages instead force you to pre-declare > that a variable is a "string" or "integer", and then to invoke a > function or method which explicitly converts one to the other, and thus > adding "five" to 10 would result in a compile-time error in most cases. > > This conflates "type safety" with "static typing"; type checks can also > be done at run-time Yes they can, but I'm speaking to a Java guy here, so I simplified and abbreviated. Anything else would have taken far too long to explain. Seems to me that explaining these distinctions is precisely what is required. It may even open a few minds. Even if not, it would be a shame if Ranga were allowed to be railroaded with the help of a false dichotomy. > Unfortunately, someone who doesn't like Perl is probably going to > really hate Common Lisp . . . Not so. I work at a company that uses Common LISP heavily, and I'm strongly looked down on as "just a Perl programmer". I've long thought that Perl seems to be evolving towards Lisp semantics (albeit with line-noise syntax), so that seems unfair. See http://xrl.us/e774 for a (very recent) example. Someone who doesn't like Perl, and DOES like statically typed languages, will probably hate Common LISP, but never underestimate the power of a Common LISP programmer to look down on other languages ;-) Second only to that of a Scheme programmer. ;-} > CPAN would be helped by dynamic type safety. It probably owes its large > size to the lack of static typing. Not really. The size is mostly due to the thousands of packages, and many versions of each. That's not to say that run-time type checking would not be a win. But there are more packages than there would be if Perl programmers had to spew declarations everywhere. That's all I meant. I'm psyched about PUGS, as I'm finally looking forward to a foreseeable future that has Perl 6 in it! Talk about fast starts. I've only just heard about PUGS (reading the latest "Perl 6 Summary"), but it seems to be growing like wildfire. -- Bob _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
