What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language

[Ketil Malde]

"Marshall" <marshall.spight at gmail.com> writes:

> There are also what I call "packaging" issues, such as
> being able to run partly-wrong programs on purpose so
> that one would have the opportunity to do runtime analysis
> without having to, say, implement parts of some interface
> that one isn't interested in testing yet. These could also
> be solved in a statically typed language. (Although
> historically it hasn't been done that way.)

I keep hearing this, but I guess I fail to understand it.  How
"partly-wrong" do you require the program to be?

During development, I frequently sprinkle my (Haskell) program with
'undefined' and 'error "implement later"' - which then lets me run the
implemented parts until execution hits one of the 'undefined's.

The "cost" of static typing for running an incomplete program is thus
simply that I have to name entities I refer to.  I'd argue that this
is good practice anyway, since it's easy to see what remains to be
done. (Python doesn't seem to, but presumably a serious dynamically
typed system would warn about references to entities not in scope?) 

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants