On 12/08/2009, at 11:57 AM, Nathan de Vries wrote:
> > On 12/08/2009, at 11:05 AM, Mark Wotton wrote: >> ...you can make certain guarantees about what a piece of code will >> do just from the type system and the fact that it compiles >> successfully. > > Brings to mind Knuth who famously quipped: "Beware of bugs in the > above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.". There's a difference between a human-acceptable proof and a compiler- acceptable proof, though. If I have a list of work to be done in C or Ruby, I have to specify an ordering, or come up with some kind of manual proof that it's ok to compute them in any order. You get that property for free in a purely functional language. (I would also be interested to see if there actually _were_ any bugs in Knuth's code, too :) mark --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
