From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2002-12-18T01:49:44+09:00
Subject: Re: help -- persuade my boss to adopt ruby

On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 12:55:06AM +0900, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> In my experience it doesn't. Static typing protects you from errors 
> that you just never make (it doesn't even do much for that dolt down 
> the hall that you wish would have a horrible keyboarding accident and 
> never code again), and it very much gets in the way--it's one of the 
> reasons collection classes are so much of a pain in statically typed 
> languages.

I make these errors from time to time in C++.  Consider:

  template<typename T>
  void print_vector(vector<T> const & v)
  {
    for(int j = 0; j < v.length(); ++j)
    {
      std::cout << v[j] << std::endl;
    }
  }

Here I'm comparing an int (j) to a size_t (v.length()).  The compiler
will warn be about comparing a signed to an unsigned (since if the
vector is large enough, this could be a serious mistake).  I won't have
this problem in Ruby -- but only because Ruby has no notion of an
unsigned integer, not because Ruby is dynamically typed.

Paul