Much of the power of object oriented languages can really be traced to effectively having a rich type system (if you identify classes with types). For example, in Haskell, you can write an identity function for integers as
id (x: Int) = x but the fact that x is an integer is really unimportant and, in fact, you can legally write id x = x for a similar function, albeit one not restricted in the type of parameter it accepts. In MUMPS, of course, you can write ID(X) ; Q X to achieve a similar effect, but this sacrifices all type information, possibly not what you want. For example, you could write MyInc (x: Int) = x + 1 but not restricting x to a numeric type can lead to nonsense operations like trying to add 1 to to true (or a string). === Gregory Woodhouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
