What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language

[Hendrik Maryns]

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Sacha schreef:
> "Joachim Durchholz" <jo at durchholz.org> wrote in message 
> news:e6tt7j$b41$1 at online.de...
>> Raffael Cavallaro schrieb:
>>> On 2006-06-14 15:04:34 -0400, Joachim Durchholz <jo at durchholz.org> said:
>>>
>>>> Um... heterogenous lists are not necessarily a sign of expressiveness. 
>>>> The vast majority of cases can be transformed to homogenous lists 
>>>> (though these might then contain closures or OO objects).
>>>>
>>>> As to references to nonexistent functions - heck, I never missed these, 
>>>> not even in languages without type inference :-)
>>>>
>>>> [[snipped - doesn't seem to relate to your answer]]
>> Give a heterogenous list that would to too awkward to live in a 
>> statically-typed language.
> 
> Many lists are heterogenous, even in statically typed languages.
> For instance lisp code are lists, with several kinds of atoms and 
> sub-lists..
> A car dealer will sell cars, trucks and equipment..
> In a statically typed language you would need to type the list on a common 
> ancestor...
> What would then be the point of statical typing , as you stilll need to type 
> check
> each element in order to process that list ? Sure you can do this in a 
> statically-typed
> language, you just need to make sure some relevant ancestor exists. In my 
> experience
> you'll end up with the base object-class more often than not, and that's 
> what i call
> dynamic typing.

In my experience you won’t.  I almost never have a List<Object> (Java),
and when I have one, I start thinking on how I can improve the code to
get rid of it.

H.
- --
Hendrik Maryns

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