On 21/05/2012, at 12:22 AM, Raoul Duke wrote: > On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 11:44 PM, john skaller > <skal...@users.sourceforge.net> wrote: >> I guess it depends on the base language: Racket and Clojure are >> both Lisp/Scheme dialects, right? > > > for me i want things typechecked from the get-go. :-) having an > inference engine in there is nice, although mostly i think the > real-world experience is that you might as well put in types manually > along the way. otherwise the errors you get are weird and confused.
It's more than that: at least Hindley Milner inference can't handle everything you want, eg monomorphisation restriction, can't pass polymorphic functions, etc. In Ocaml I find the biggest problems: (a) I don't know what the a type a function argument is, my solution is to write "blob" and then look at the error message :) (b) I get an error on correct code, because some incorrect code somewhere fixed the type, and the ocaml system isn't smart enough to tell me where it deduced the type. I believe some limited mixing of overloading and inference is possible, but the two features tend to conflict. Also, I believe correct programming is related to thinking properly about types and for me that's easier if I can see encodings of them in a few places. > but at least inference lets me write a replacement for my 10 line bash > scripts w/out the ascii overhead. Well you should try that in Felix and let me know what needs to be done to make the conversion reasonably simple, and the result as readable (or more readable :) Particularly attention to portability of the script, i.e. so it works on both Unix and Windows. -- john skaller skal...@users.sourceforge.net http://felix-lang.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Felix-language mailing list Felix-language@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/felix-language
