🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <613@optima.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
>In article  <YR+9VUB@xds13.ferranti.com> Peter da Silva writes:
>]In article <602@optima.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
>]> Now people have actually come to believe, against all
>]> evidence, that static typing is important for program reliability.
>]
>]No, they believe that dynamic typing imposes a certain unavoidable runtime
>]overhead, and aren't willing to pay that cost.
>
>You haven't been following the thread.  Only one person of all that
>replied has mentioned the overhead.  Everyone else is worried that
>types errors aren't detected by the compiler.  BTW, I mentioned the
>high overhead in my first posting on the subject.

Your original statement would seem to refer to people (programmers,
managers who decide upon programming languages, etc.) in general,
not only us Usenet freaks who are taking part in this illustrious
thread of discussion.  Surely at least Peter da Silva meant it that
way, and I think very often the reason he suggested is the most
important one.

Just think about "typical" C hackers.  Although C has some degree
of static typing, they could not care less for "program reliability".
On the other hand, they easily get mad about any byte of runtime
overhead that might want to creep into their objects.  The same
horror of overhead seems to be common even among C++ programmers.

Markku Sakkinen
Department of Computer Science and Information Systems
University of Jyvaskyla (a's with umlauts)
PL 35
SF-40351 Jyvaskyla (umlauts again)
Finland
          SAKKINEN@FINJYU.bitnet (alternative network address)