From: Matt Gushee <mgushee@...>
Date: 2002-09-29T15:00:58+09:00
Subject: Re: thoughts on typelessness

On Sun, Sep 29, 2002 at 02:29:33PM +0900, Gavin Sinclair wrote:

> I think types will always be important in computer programming.  Anyone care to
> disagree?

I'm not sure I disagree, and being a self-taught programmer who is just
now, little by little, learning computer science theory, I don't have
much basis for an original contribution to this debate. But I've been
following a long-running and bitter (yet nonetheless substantive and
extremely well-informed) debate on the xml-dev list over the merits of
static data types in W3C XML Schema. And one of the arguments I've seen
against static typing, goes something like: static types tie programmers
hands, yet leave the really hard problems unsolved--the really hard
problems being mainly related to ensuring that objects/variables have
appropriate values. It made a lot of sense to me, at least for the kind
of rigid and opaque type system found in languages like C, C++, and
Java.

But it seems to me that more sophisticated approaches like Eiffel's
contracts and Haskell's pattern-based types go a long way toward
addressing that shortcoming.

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee@havenrock.com
http://www.havenrock.com/