From: Premshree Pillai <premshree.pillai@...>
Date: 2005-01-10T00:47:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Type inference in ruby

On Sun, 9 Jan 2005 04:16:36 +0900, Eric Anderson <eric@afaik.us> wrote:
> Trevor Andrade wrote:
> > I was wondering whether it would be possible to have a type inference system
> > in ruby.  My question was asked before
> 
> I am sure it is possible to implement but I think most people end up
> wondering why do it? If you want a typed system (strong or weak) there
> are plenty of languages that support it natively. For me that is one of

Your sentence seems ambiguous. What exactly do you mean by it? _All_
languages are either strong typed or weak typed.

> the reasons I left those other languages. For me a type system has too

I think that's the same reason most people love dynamic languages like
Python and Ruby. Both of them are also strong typed. I like that.
However, a lot of people favor static typing. There has been
discussion going around to implement optional static typing in Python.
There's also pychecker (http://pychecker.sf.net/) for Python for
syntax error checking and stuff that wouldn't have been caught by the
interpreter itself. Wonder if there's something like this for Ruby.
:-w

> much coding overhead without much benefit. The two advantages are:
> 
> * Catches type errors
> * Possibly better optimizations
> 
> To answer the first advantage Ruby encourages Unit testing. Unit testing
> it 10 times better than type checking because it can not only check for
> valid types but also check for logic errors. So why spend the overhead
> of a type system when unit testing is better.
> 
> The second advantage again isn't an issue for me. Ruby is fast enough.
> If I need it faster I can profile the code to find bottlenecks. If I
> need it even faster I can recode the bottlenecks in C. Again, the
> overhead of a type system is not worth even the possibility of better
> optimizations.
> 
> Just my two cents,
> 
> Eric
> 
> 


-- 
Premshree Pillai
http://www.livejournal.com/~premshree