David Hopwood wrote: > I can accept that dynamic tagging provides some support for latent typing > performed "in the programmer's head". But that still does not mean that > dynamic tagging is the same thing as latent typing
No, I'm not saying it is, although I am saying that the former supports the latter. > or that languages > that use dynamic tagging are "latently typed". This simply is not a > property of the language (as you've already conceded). Right. I see at least two issues here: one is that as a matter of shorthand, compressing "language which supports latent typing" to "latently-typed language" ought to be fine, as long as the term's meaning is understood. But beyond that, there's an issue here about the definition of "the language". When programming in a latently-typed language, a lot of action goes on outside the language - reasoning about static properties of programs that are not captured by the semantics of the language. This means that there's a sense in which the language that the programmer programs in is not the same language that has a formal semantic definition. As I mentioned in another post, programmers are essentially mentally programming in a richer language - a language which has informal (static) types - but the code they write down elides this type information, or else puts it in comments. We have to accept, then, that the formal semantic definitions of dynamically-checked languages are incomplete in some important ways. Referring to those semantic definitions as "the language", as though that's all there is to the language in a broader sense, is misleading. In this context, the term "latently-typed language" refers to the language that a programmer experiences, not to the subset of that language which is all that we're typically able to formally define. Anton -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list