From: Paul Brannan <paul@...>
Date: 2002-03-12T03:54:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Interesting link on static/dynamic typing...

On Sat, Mar 09, 2002 at 02:13:20PM +0900, Frank Mitchell wrote:
> One of the more annoying things about Java is that, whenever you put an
> object into a collection class you have to typecast it to get it out ...
> and if due to some bug the wrong type of object got in, good luck
> finding where.  Another annoyance is having to wrap an int or float in
> an object to add it to a collection.

There is a similar problem in Ruby.  If I have an array of Foo objects,
and I pull out a Bar, good luck finding out how the Bar object got
there.  What's worse, if Bar implements a subset of Foo's interface, the
bug may be very subtle.

I've considered implementing a homogenous Array in Ruby, but there are a
lot of ways an element can sneak into an array, so it's not exactly a
trivial problem.

Paul