Typing system vs. Java

[Alex Martelli]

<brueckd at tbye.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.996538497.304.python-list at python.org...
>
> On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Peter Milliken wrote:
>
> > I have used a very strongly typed language (Ada), I haven't tried
Haskall or
> > Ocaml as one repondent mentioned, but I claim that with Ada, 95-98% of
> > "normal" bugs are out of my programs once I get the compiler to produce
> > executable code. The only bugs that are left are the purely logic bugs.
>
> Only 2-5% of your bugs are purely logical!? While I'd agree that once your
> compiler produces executable code the bugs left are of the logical
> variety, that number seems incredibly low (or the number of bugs you

What do you mean by "logical" in this context?  On some keyboards
I have the '+' and '-' symbols on the same key (one shifted, one
unshifted), so I sometimes have a typo where I use '+' where I
mean '-' or vice versa.  No compiler I know catches this kind of
bug.  Yet it's clearly a common typo, not anything having to do
with conceptualization.  Fortunately, unit-testing catches this
(and most other typos) quite effectively:-).


Alex