An unspeakable act

[Ralf Muschall]

James Logajan <JamesL at Lugoj.Com> writes:

> applied, such as containers, must at some level provide typeless handles. In

IMHO there is a difference between typeless and polymorphic handles.
The latter protect me from accidentally consing a string to a list of
numbers.

> C/C++ those handles are typically (void *). In Java they are typically

IIRC in C++ they are things like "template <class T> set::iterator".
C uses (void*) because it is an assembler, not a HLL.

> dynamically typed, since it is too productive a concept for a modern

I like Luca Cardelli's cartoon about dynamic typing.  But probably a
real type system would require the users to learn about this,
restricting the user base.

...
> type declarations are all syntactic cruft that can seriously slow new code
...

I like it despite of the indentation thing and of the lack of all
the features mentioned in your last sentence :-)

Ralf