[Python-Dev] some interesting readings

[Nick Coghlan]

Samuele Pedroni wrote:
> because I was reminded of them recently, because they may be useful 
> landmarks in the prospective of future discussions, because expanding
> one's understanding of the problem/solution space of language design
> is quite a good thing if one is interested in such things...
> 
> 1)
> Gilad Bracha.  Pluggable Type Systems . OOPSLA04 Workshop on Revival of 
> Dynamic  Languages  ( 
> http://pico.vub.ac.be/%7Ewdmeuter/RDL04/papers/Bracha.pdf )
> 
> As a talk:
> Pluggable Types, originally given at Aarhus University in March 2003, 
> and repeated since at Berne and elsewhere.
> ( http://bracha.org/pluggable-types.pdf )
> 
> 2)
> http://homepages.cwi.nl/~ralf/OOHaskell/
> state of the art experiment on trying to reconcile object orientation, 
> type inference and as much as possible expressiveness
> 
> PS: I think 1 is much more relevant than 2 for Python as we know it.

I'd have to agree with that - I didn't actually make it all the way through 
the second one, but an awful of lot of what I did read seemed to taken up with 
clever workarounds designed to trick the Haskell type inferencer into letting 
the authors of the paper do some fairly basic things (like having a 
heterogeneous collection of subtypes).

There are some fascinating ideas in the first paper, though. It actually had 
me wondering about the possibilities of PyPy's object spaces, but I don't 
really know enough about those to determine whether or not such a connection 
is actually meaningful.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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