🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <OLSON.91Apr6155734@lear.juliet.ll.mit.edu> olson@lear.juliet.ll.mit.edu ( Steve Olson) writes:
>
>In article <28924@dime.cs.umass.edu> yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu (victor yodaiken) writes:
>   The problem with "untyped" expressions is that they are inherently
>   ambiguous. If I'm writing about  semigroups and regular languages I must
>   tell you when a*b is concatenation and when it is semigroup addition.
>   Figuring this out from the context alone is difficult for most people.
>
>This sounds more like overuse of operator overloading rather than anything
>having to do with static vs. dynamic typing.  This problem could occur just as
>easily in C++ as in CLOS.  If you never want to mix the two types then 
>renaming the operators will remove all confusion.  If you do want to mix the
>two types then the problem is the same whether you are using a dynamically
>typed language or a statically typed sortof-dynamic-typing-through-subclassing-
>and-virtual-functions language.


I don't want to have to give up overloading --
one of the real conveniences of mathematical notation. But if I declare
variable types, there is no problem.
So, if I write: let a,b be elements of the alphabet and
let a',b' be the corresponding elements of the semigroup, then
a*b and a'*b' are easy to distinguish. By making the types of the
variables explicit, I make the overloading of * unambiguous. An
expression a*b' where the two variables have different types makes no
sense in this context and I'd like the compiler to catch it.