From: Gareth.McCaughan@... (Gareth McCaughan)
Date: 2001-12-12T06:43:37+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28273] Re: The benefits of dynamic typing?

Michael Cook wrote:

> >> This post offers good coverage of all sides of the issue - could you post 
> >> it to the RubyDiscussions section of the wiki on Rubygarden.com?
> >> 
> > Ok, check out
> >
> > http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?DynamicVsStaticTyping
> 
> it doesn't seem unreasonable that a language should support both
> static and dynamic typing.  then, if i knew at compile time what the
> types would be, i could tell the compiler, and i could possibly
> expose some problems at compile time.  but if i didn't know the
> types at compile time, that would be okay too.

Take a look at Common Lisp, or Dylan. They have exactly
that feature. Good compilers for CL and Dylan do sophisticated
type inference, so that you don't have to declare all the
types you know in order to get good compile-time checking
and run-time efficiency.

-- 
Gareth McCaughan  Gareth.McCaughan@pobox.com
..sig under construc