Novel Thoughts on Scripting and Languages

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Andrew Dalke <adalke at mindspring.com>:
...
| The Python party line (which I agree with) is that there are plenty
| of other errors which can arise in programming.  Type checking is
| one way to find those errors, but a good regression suite -- which
| you need in any case -- catches nearly all the errors that type
| checking would have caught, and catch more.  The downside of static
| typing is that you have to enter in all those types, so the code is
| more verbose and harder to read, understand, and maintain.
|
|> To me, Python and Java are similar because they both support class and
|> inheritance, and garbage collection. I wouldn't say C++ and Python are
|> similar. Of course, variable declaration or not, blah blah ...
|
| Hmm... OCaml supports classes
|
| http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/htmlman/manual005.html#ss:classes-and-objects
|
| and inheritance
|
| http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/htmlman/manual005.html#ss:inheritance

And it supports type inference.  Statically typed, but you don't
``have to enter in all those types.''

| but it's a functional language.  I think again (as others have asserted)
| that your exprience in programming languages needs some broadening.

Yes, and to pay more attention to what we can learn from that experience.

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu