On Tue, 2005-02-22 at 19:32 -0500, Bob Rogers wrote: > The type safe programming languages instead force you to pre-declare > that a variable is a "string" or "integer", and then to invoke a > function or method which explicitly converts one to the other, and thus > adding "five" to 10 would result in a compile-time error in most cases. > > This conflates "type safety" with "static typing"; type checks can also > be done at run-time
Yes they can, but I'm speaking to a Java guy here, so I simplified and abbreviated. Anything else would have taken far too long to explain. > Unfortunately, someone who doesn't like Perl is probably going to > really hate Common Lisp . . . Not so. I work at a company that uses Common LISP heavily, and I'm strongly looked down on as "just a Perl programmer". Someone who doesn't like Perl, and DOES like statically typed languages, will probably hate Common LISP, but never underestimate the power of a Common LISP programmer to look down on other languages ;-) > CPAN would be helped by dynamic type safety. It probably owes its large > size to the lack of static typing. Not really. The size is mostly due to the thousands of packages, and many versions of each. That's not to say that run-time type checking would not be a win. I'm psyched about PUGS, as I'm finally looking forward to a foreseeable future that has Perl 6 in it! _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
