On 4 Aug., 06:06, Don Geddis
geddis.org> wrote:> Ingo Menger
consultant.com> wrote on Fri, 03 Aug 2007:
>>> My personal opinion here is that we will have untyped languages for toy
>> scripts, as it used to be. And for the rest, where dollars or human lifes
>> count, we'll have languages with even more advanced type systems.
>
> Presumably, you mean to include dynamically typed languages like Common Lisp
> under your "untyped" category, and compile-time statically typed languages
> as the precursors to these "even more advanced type systems".
Sure.
> Surely you can see how insulting your comments are to the highly skilled
> professional programmers who are currently choosing to implement their
> algorithms in languages like Common Lisp;
No, I can't see how a opinion (explicitly marked as such) about how
future devolpments will evolve can possibly be insulting.
> Perhaps you'll
> begin to see that programming language design involves tradeoffs, and that
> your cherished compile-time static typing is not necessarily a Universal
> Good.
Straw men, and, since you adress me here, I have posted half a dozen
comments here where I admint that current type systems have their
limits and are far from being "Universal Good". I repeat it here
since, admittedly, the thread is quite long.
>> The time is not so far away when we will regard an
>> ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException a typing error, just as we today may regard
>> a NullPointerException a typing error
>
> Really.
Yes.
> Consider this program (in pseudocode):
>
> define array A [1..78556];
> set i = compute_smallest_sierpinski_number();
> set A[i] = 10;
>
> It may help you to reference
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_number
> In short, the smallest Sierpinski number is probably 78557, but there
> remains a chance that there is a smaller one. The answer is deterministic,
> computable, the algorithm is known ... but the answer is not yet known by
> any human being.
>
> Good luck inventing a compile-time static type system that will label the
> final line of code as "ArrayIndexOutOfBounds",
That's too easy, ye'know. :)
The compiler would simply flag any array access. Voil
