From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2005-06-01T14:37:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Intellisense and the psychology of typing

Hello Austin,


AZ> Not at all. Self is an indication that my suggestion will work:

AZ>   [...] the compiled method is specialized on the type of the
AZ>   receiver. If the same message is later sent to a receiver of
AZ>   different type (e.g., a float instead of an integer), a new

Which simply means that it is optimized with exactly one type hint.
It's easy as inside a method "self" can never it's type. But it's
not possible to optimize very much with this. Eiffel and D are using the
feature to transform most of the virtual method calls to binary calls.
But you get very few optimizations that you can get from better
hinting.

AZ> Gee. It looks like I'm right. Self is an untyped language -- and the
AZ> HotSpot technology in Java is *based on the research for Self*.
AZ> (Indeed, note the point about the compiled cache and recompile and
AZ> reoptimize. That describes HotSpot exactly.)

I've never seen very good documentation about HotSpot internals, what
does compiled cache mean, what does recompile and reoptimze mean. As
long is don't see some implementation details this is for me just
marketing hype.

Sure recompile can be something in the oder to check the arguments so
that if i have:  x + y and in the past i knew that x and y are often
integers then something like

if (ISINTEGER(x) && ISINTEGER(y)) return x+y;
callinfix(x,'+',y)

The if statement can be transformed to one (SUN Sparc V8 architecture)
or multiple machine code operations.

>> Speed is only one advantage to a static typing system. In general,
>> static typing makes it easier (for programs as well as people) to
>> analyse programs that use it.

AZ> Bullshit. This is a lie told by proponents of statically typed
AZ> languages that has been shown false again and again and again.
AZ> Static typing doesn't increase safety, ability to be analysed, or
AZ> anything else -- that doesn't help the compiler of said statically
AZ> typed language. There are side benefits from IDEs that have been
AZ> observed in the last serveral years, but statically typed languages
AZ> have been around a lot longer than autocompletion. And we *still*
AZ> get buffer overruns.

Buffer Overruns have nothing to do with statically typed langauges.
And i don't see any evidence why your argument should be right other
then "religious believe in dynamically typed language".

AZ> Sorry, but I question even the belief that speed is an advantage to
AZ> a static typing system -- remember that C++ was *slower* than C for
AZ> years (and in some cases, still is), and they're both statically
AZ> typed languages.

Sorry but this is wrong. Seems that you never ever looked at
compiler generation.

Also your argument is that one statically typed language implementation is
slower then another statically typed language implementation. What a
huge surpise.


-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's