From: Dan Sugalski <dan@...>
Date: 2002-12-18T02:05:16+09:00
Subject: Re: help -- persuade my boss to adopt ruby

At 1:49 AM +0900 12/18/02, Paul Brannan wrote:
>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++.

How often is time to time, though? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? It's just 
not a common error, so the argument that it's useful just doesn't 
wash. (And the warning in your provided code is disingenuous as it is 
a valid comparison in at least some of the cases, though worth proper 
checking)

Of course, the C-ish languages don't help there, as the common 
solution seems to be a cast rather than fixing the code, which often 
makes things worse...
-- 
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk