Michael (Micksa) Slade wrote: > I love perl. And if I had/took the time to learn python or ruby, I'm > sure I would love them too (maybe slightly less, but let's not go > there). Without dynamic typing I doubt these languages would be as > flexible as they are.
Yep, flexibile enough to allow people to write buggy code that breaks at run time. The big thing that static typing buys you is the ability to completely avoid a large class of errors because the static type checking in the compiler finds then at compile time rather than the runtime environment finding it at runtime. I also suspect that the flexibilty you see in Perl/Python/Ruby has little to do with dynamic typing and has much more to do with Perl/Python/Ruby being high level languages in comparision to the statically typed languages you know like C/C++/Java. However, Andre and I would both tell you that C/C++/Java are not the best statically typed languages around. Ocaml (my preference) and Haskell (Andre's preference) are a much fairer match for Perl/Python/Ruby. > So anyway I can't simple argue that you're wrong because I'm offended :) > So I thought about it and I realised, dynamic typing can be seen > coneptually as a form of object polymorphism. Can you show me *anything* you are doing regularly with dynamic typing that you think can't be done with a truely statically typed high level language like Ocaml or Haskell? Erik -- +-----------------------------------------------------------+ Erik de Castro Lopo +-----------------------------------------------------------+ "life is too long to know C++ well" -- Erik Naggum _______________________________________________ coders mailing list coders@slug.org.au http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/coders
