John Porter wrote:
> Daniel S. Wilkerson wrote:
> > It is doubtful we shall have compilers that can tell you for example,
> > that you used the wrong algorithm.
>
> Right. I think that's what Schwern was getting at, when he said
> > > > > Type checking is nice, but its just one class of error-checking.
The Halting Problem demonstrates that you can never automatically check for
all bugs, since you can't even check if a program will halt or not. But, so
what? The more bugs you find automatically, the better.
> And it may explain why programs written in Perl -- dynamic,
> weakly-typed though it be -- are at least no more buggy than
> programs written in low-level languages.
It would be interesting for someone to measure that, however I doubt that it
is so.
Its true that any language can be abused. But in certain languages, when you
really try to tighten things down and bullet proof your code, you just can't.
> But I think we've strayed into the topic of advocacy.
This is a language design form, and Perl explicitly draws features from other
languages. All the books brag about that in the introduction. Therefore,
I'm suggesting drawing a feature from one more language. So, I think we are
right on the mark in this discussion.
Daniel
