🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <id.6DTO.VWK@ferranti.com> peter@ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
|How about:
|
|	   The word `type' refers to the set of operations that may
|	   be performed on a collection of data.

This is still a little buggy. Consider the (constructed :-) example of
a language that has two mappings from the same _abstract_ type to the
same storage format - say 1-s and 2-s complement integers (or an int
and an unsigned both being used to hold numbers between 1 and 100, a
very common case in C).

Now the same "operations", like +, may be available for both, even
with the same meanings. But for SOME purposes we want to be able to
say that they have different types - certainly you can't reliably
substitute equals for equals between them without the language's
intervention.

There's definitely something to the "access path" approach, even in
the absence of explicit pointers.
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stephen p spackman         Center for Information and Language Studies
stephen@estragon.uchicago.edu                    University of Chicago
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