John Hughes wrote:
Lennart Augustsson wrote:
On the subject of type signatures, I don't want to
make them mandatory, but I think they should be strongly
encouraged. I don't buy the argument that they make
refactoring programs that much harder. It's still
very easy to do, the type checker will tell you exactly
where. :)
It can still be in a LOT of places--far too many for comfort. I'm not
making this
up--I've experienced severe problems in practice caused by this very
point. It depends
what kind of code you're working with, of course. I'm not saying type
signatures
are ALWAYS a problem for refactoring, just that they sometimes are--and
that
it makes sense to leave it up the programmer whether or not to include
them.
So what if it's in a lot of places? The compiler tells you where to
change. Each change takes a few seconds. Even with hundreds of changes
you'd probably be done in under half an hour.
Of course, you'd like a tool to do these kind of changes.
All that said, I think not being able to give a name to a context is
a real weakness in Haskell. It's one of the few things that cannot
be named, and being able to do so would help refactoring and modularity.
-- Lennart
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