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On what type inference is, from a PL researcher: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4771#comment-75771 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4771#comment-75771

• fauigerzigerk 11y ago
  There will always be some who insist that only the most advanced form of X is "really" X.
  • catnaroek 11y ago
    ML-style type inference is hardly “advanced”. And I'm even willing to count more limited forms of inference as seen in Scala, Rust or Swift - what they have is only local, but it's actual inference. But what you're claiming is the equivalent of having a “number inference” engine that can conclude that “x = 8” from “x = 4 * 2” - that's not “inference”, it's just evaluating a single expression. Actually, what Go has is even less than that, because Go's type checker doesn't need to reduce anything.
  • fmap 11y ago
    It's more of a vocabulary issue. In PL theory "type inference" is a well-defined concept. It means that you have the ability to reconstruct the types of a program without annotations. No mainstream (imperative) programming language has type inference in this sense (for good reasons). That's why the term is usually used with a different meaning when talking about mainstream programming languages.