On 06/28/2013 03:44 PM, ponce wrote:
On Friday, 28 June 2013 at 00:34:54 UTC, JS wrote:
Would it be possible for a language(specifically d) to have the
ability to automatically type a variable by looking at its use cases
without adding too much complexity?
Well ocaml has it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner)
and well it's not all that positive, at least in that language.
Combined with parametric polymorphism it's nice and sound, except it has
the potential to hide a simple typo a lot further from where it is
(think mixing up integer operators and FP operators).
As it break overloading on "leaves", it is the reason ocaml has
"print_string" and "print_int" which is quite frankly ugly.
The type system might be too primitive in that regard. Haskell has 'print'.
Once you have type inference, the first thing you do to make your code
readable is to add back type annotations.
... at a few places.
