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This is not precisely about Tratt's response, but there was a great discussion on another Bob Harper post where Matthias Felleisen argued that while dynamic lan
by hyperpape 12y ago
This is not precisely about Tratt's response, but there was a great discussion on another Bob Harper post where Matthias Felleisen argued that while dynamic languages are semantically unityped, at the level of pragmatics (in the linguistic sense) they allow the programmer to freely mix various implicit type disciplines (http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/bellman-confirms-a-suspicion/#comment-1362 http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/bellman-conf...). The cost is of course that the programmer gets essentially no assistance in verifying that their implicit types are consistent.
- tel 12y agoThere's no reason to believe that you can't freely mix implicit type disciplines in "statically typed" languages, either! It's just (a) oftentimes you can actually reify those implicit schemes into actual types and it's often worth the cost to do so and (b) if your compiler depends upon a choice of type semantics in order to function and your implicit system is inconsistent with that selected type semantics then your analysis may not guarantee compilation! But again: dynamic types are a mode of use of static types. --- To be clear, this is the brunt of Bob's response in the linked thread anyway.