begin quoting David Brown as of Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 02:57:27PM -0800:
> On Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 02:32:45PM -0800, Chuck Esterbrook wrote:
[snip]
> >I agree. Cobra does not do Hindley-Milner type-inference. It's
> >type-inference is a shortcut for declarations, as you pointed out. Its
> >support for dynamic binding enables it to act like Python or Smalltalk
> >where variables and expressions do not have compile-time types.
>
> I don't mean to be disparaging. Declaration inference is immensely useful.
> Having to declare types of every variable and argument is a lot of what
> makes most static-type programming so tedious.
>
> LongArduousType foo = new LongArduousType(..);
>
> I think distracts from readability.
Hm. If I were typing with one hand, say, I think that would be tedious.
Otherwise, I'd be wondering why LongArduousType was considered a good
name. Long, arduous names are typically a sign, to me, that I haven't
thought about the name or the class/type very much.
That's not to say that I haven't seen LongArduousType-style classes
(XMLBuilderFactory comes to mind as a recent WTF?) elsewhere. It
happens.
Then again, putting all the variable declarations at the top of the
method/function gives you much of what you want.
function name( args ... ) {
LongArduousType foo;
. . .
foo = new LongArduousType(...);
. . .
}
Granted, if you're averaging three to six lines per function/method,
then you're growing the line count for no good reason.
Also, I've been told that a distressingly large amount of ADA code is
handling the types properly.
> It's much better to only declare the
> type there when it is going to be different.
Hm?
/me ponders
I'm guessing you mean that
Foo foo = new Foo();
is redundant, you want to write
foo = new Foo();
But if you want to use Bar, which happens to extend Foo, then
foo = new Bar();
would make foo of type Bar, so then you might be inclined to write
Foo foo = new Bar();
Yes? No? Sorta-kinda?
--
Language that have type magic and Oh Oh Pee
Are like a combination lock, and a key.
Stewart Stremler
--
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