6 ms·

"And I've long thought it was a mistake to abandon strong typing... I know most people disagree" How do you know that?

by gdy 7y ago

jchw 7y ago
I, for one, disagree that most people disagree. Strong typing effectively enforces variants, and the stronger and more powerful the type system, the more it can do, with the trade off of added complexity (though not necessarily verbosity, at least not linearly with complexity.) Strongly typed enums are a great example of a big value add. Not to mention the improvements types add for developer experience and the added implicit documentation they provide!
- denton-scratch 7y ago
  Well OK, I don't know what "most people" think, and I'm glad to be contradicted on this matter. Most of the people I've worked with in the last decade have favoured weakly-typed languages, and Pascal in particular has been a target for ridicule (among the small proportion of my colleagues who have ever looked at the language). The version of Pascal on which I was raised was an Intel Pascal; I can't find a link just now. It was definitely not Turbo Pascal, which I think was Borland. But both versions had this restriction on the size of a compiled module, complete with stack and data - 64K, the size of a 8086 memory "segment". These 8086 vices have genes that survive in Intel architectures to the present day. I also did some work with PL/M ("Programming Language for Microprocessors", I think), a much nicer language than Pascal, targeted at those same 1980s 8-bit chips. Pascal was invented as a teaching language; PL/M was an IBM product designed for production work - a cut-down version of PL/1, which was a heavy-duty mainframe language. Pascal and PL/M are similar, and they're all children of ALGOL. I taught college classes using Turbo Pascal; I had barely any experience with that compiler, and the students were a nightmare (it was not by any measure a "top school"). I faked it, and I got away with it.
  - Narishma 7y ago
    I think only the first few versions of TP were limited to 64k binaries (.COM files), and that may have been because they were mainly aimed at Z80 CP/M systems more than the IBM PC.

"And I've long thought it was a mistake to abandon strong typing... I know most people disagree" How do you know that?

by gdy 7y ago

"And I've long thought it was a mistake to abandon strong typing... I know most people disagree" How do you know that?

jchw 7y ago

I, for one, disagree that most people disagree. Strong typing effectively enforces variants, and the stronger and more powerful the type system, the more it can do, with the trade off of added complexity (though not necessarily verbosity, at least not linearly with complexity.) Strongly typed enums are a great example of a big value add. Not to mention the improvements types add for developer experience and the added implicit documentation they provide!

denton-scratch 7y ago
Well OK, I don't know what "most people" think, and I'm glad to be contradicted on this matter. Most of the people I've worked with in the last decade have favoured weakly-typed languages, and Pascal in particular has been a target for ridicule (among the small proportion of my colleagues who have ever looked at the language). The version of Pascal on which I was raised was an Intel Pascal; I can't find a link just now. It was definitely not Turbo Pascal, which I think was Borland. But both versions had this restriction on the size of a compiled module, complete with stack and data - 64K, the size of a 8086 memory "segment". These 8086 vices have genes that survive in Intel architectures to the present day. I also did some work with PL/M ("Programming Language for Microprocessors", I think), a much nicer language than Pascal, targeted at those same 1980s 8-bit chips. Pascal was invented as a teaching language; PL/M was an IBM product designed for production work - a cut-down version of PL/1, which was a heavy-duty mainframe language. Pascal and PL/M are similar, and they're all children of ALGOL. I taught college classes using Turbo Pascal; I had barely any experience with that compiler, and the students were a nightmare (it was not by any measure a "top school"). I faked it, and I got away with it.
- Narishma 7y ago
  I think only the first few versions of TP were limited to 64k binaries (.COM files), and that may have been because they were mainly aimed at Z80 CP/M systems more than the IBM PC.