Pascal Costanza wrote: > There is, of course, room for research on performing static type checks > in a running system, for example immediately after or before a software > update is applied, or maybe even on separate type checking on software > increments such that guarantees for their composition can be derived. > However, I am not aware of a lot of work in that area, maybe because the > static typing community is too focused on compile-time issues.
Not everyone is. For instance, Don Stewart has been enormously successful in deploying such a system for Haskell (very much a statically typed language) in a practically usable way. It is called hs-plugins (see http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/hs-plugins/), a framework for run-time loading and re-loading of Haskell modules (in source form or already compiled, giving different levels of security). Far from being a purely academic exercise, there are interesting applications, including yi, an extensible editor, and lambdabot, an IRC bot, both available from the above same home page. Cheers, Ben -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
