From: Charles Hixson <charleshixsn@...>
Date: 2000-10-18T04:40:01+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:5649] Re: lint?

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Davide Marchignoli wrote:

> On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, Franz GEIGER wrote:
>
> > > I'm afraid it requires static type information, which Ruby does not have.
> >
> > Does it really? What about typos? E.g. someone "defines" a param
> > NavigationDefinition but refers to it as NavgationDefinition. Why do we have
> > to find such errors at runtime?
> >
> ...
> >
> > Finding type mismatches seems to me requiring static typing. But that's step
> > two - 1st one has to find all his typos.
> >
>
> I love typed languages, unfortunately the trend in last years (for
> scripting languages at least) has been toward untyped languages (someone
> could explain why???).
>
> ...
>
> Bye,
>
>                                 Davide

Statically typed languages have difficulty in dealing with data that may come in
of a type that was not planned for at compile time (or, at least, at link time).
In most of them you are reduced to treating the new data as being of a type with
the intersection of the capabilities of the possible entities.  Thus some birds
swim, some birds fly, some birds walk. And some varieties, e.g., sea gulls, can do
all of the above.   If you take the intersection, you might have the capability
move, but no knowledge of the kind of surface across which they can move. (I.e.,
object interactions are severely curtailed.)  Now technically speaking, anything
that can be done with static types can be done with dynamic types, but then this
is also equivalent to what can be done with a Turing machine.  Feasibly,
dynamically typed languages handle uncertain environments much more flexibly than
do statically typed languages.

-- (c) Charles Hixson
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