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Another worthy topic of debate that is completely unrelated to my question. Types and laziness are independent -- at least to the degree needed to provide an a

by tome 9y ago

Another worthy topic of debate that is completely unrelated to my question. Types and laziness are independent -- at least to the degree needed to provide an answer to my question.

jack9 9y ago
> Types and laziness are independent I think they are directly linked. If I have to worry about arbitrary types, my code can never be robust for the environment it runs in without raising some generic exception. This is the lazy approach. In a dynamic language, everything can be boxes to a static list of flexible types and is by default, meaning my code is succinct. This doesn't address the question (which is a strawman), but is the heart of the debate about static vs dynamic typing. Getting things done faster (with some guarantees) vs many guarantees (but not all) at a slower rate of progress (because you have to essentially duplicate code at a higher level, that the dynamic interpreter is already doing).
- tome 9y ago
  I can't actually understand anything you've said. You are using this definition of lazy, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_evaluation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_evaluation
z1mm32m4n 9y ago
That's not true. When the language is lazy, you can't give a different type to one expression that's lazy and one expression that's strict. You can write hacks into the language that tell the compiler to evaluate certain expressions strictly, but you can't capture this in the type system when the language is lazy by default. On the other hand, this is perfectly possible in a strict language.
- tome 9y ago
  Firstly, that falls under my "at least to the degree needed to provide an answer to my question" rider. Secondly, no you can't type the values but you can type the consumers of the values, i.e. the functions: http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/strictness-in-types/ http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/strictness-in-types/
  - z1mm32m4n 9y ago
    Ah, didn't realize the original question was limited to comments on dynamic typing. Regardless, that's a clever article, and an interesting tradeoff.

by tome 9y ago

Another worthy topic of debate that is completely unrelated to my question. Types and laziness are independent -- at least to the degree needed to provide an answer to my question.

jack9 9y ago

> Types and laziness are independent I think they are directly linked. If I have to worry about arbitrary types, my code can never be robust for the environment it runs in without raising some generic exception. This is the lazy approach. In a dynamic language, everything can be boxes to a static list of flexible types and is by default, meaning my code is succinct. This doesn't address the question (which is a strawman), but is the heart of the debate about static vs dynamic typing. Getting things done faster (with some guarantees) vs many guarantees (but not all) at a slower rate of progress (because you have to essentially duplicate code at a higher level, that the dynamic interpreter is already doing).

tome 9y ago
I can't actually understand anything you've said. You are using this definition of lazy, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_evaluation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_evaluation

z1mm32m4n 9y ago

That's not true. When the language is lazy, you can't give a different type to one expression that's lazy and one expression that's strict. You can write hacks into the language that tell the compiler to evaluate certain expressions strictly, but you can't capture this in the type system when the language is lazy by default. On the other hand, this is perfectly possible in a strict language.

tome 9y ago
Firstly, that falls under my "at least to the degree needed to provide an answer to my question" rider. Secondly, no you can't type the values but you can type the consumers of the values, i.e. the functions: http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/strictness-in-types/ http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/strictness-in-types/
- z1mm32m4n 9y ago
  Ah, didn't realize the original question was limited to comments on dynamic typing. Regardless, that's a clever article, and an interesting tradeoff.