From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2001-12-11T11:33:06+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28165] Re: The benefits of dynamic typing?

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:28150] Re: The benefits of dynamic typing?"
    on 01/12/11, "Mark Hahn" <mchahn@facelink.com> writes:

|The reason I lost the argument was that they claimed it would cause
|hard-to-find bugs if someone meant: "1".to_int + 1.  They claimed it was
|ambiguous.  To me it is obvious that "1"+1 means a string and 1+"1" means an
|integer (because of message passing).
|
|I made the same argument you are making: "In five years of Java coding I
|never once regretted the feature while I used it often".  And: "No one in
|the Java world has complained".

The point is static typing.  In Java, you can tell the behavior of

  a + b

from the type information of variables.  In Ruby, above code may
result in string, number, or whatever.  That's why I *changed* to
raise the exception for type mismatch.

							matz.