🚀 go-pugleaf

Douglas E. Quale:
   > This statement suggests that programs compiled in dynamic
   > languages contain more type errors than similar programs written
   > in statically typed languages.  ...

Michael Chisnall:
   [ see previous article for CACM reference and background ]

   I think that a distinction that it may be useful to draw here is
   between declarative languages (e.g.  prolog, ML, hope, miranda,
   smalltalk) which have a highly modular structure, and
   non-declarative languages (such as pascal, fortran, cobol, ada)
   which tend, imho, to give rise to rather long-winded programs.
   Gannon's results can be seen as a demonstration, then, that static
   typing is definitely better for nd languages (which is his under-
   lying model).

Hmm... yes.  The way I remember this group of threads started off with
the assertion that dynamically typed languages were less error prone
than statically typed languages because (paraphrasing slightly)
dynamically typed languages are more declarative in nature.

Maybe the emphasis should have been on declaratively typed languages
vs. non-declaratively typed languages :-)?

Douglas E. Quale:
   > Dynamic typing makes program components easier to test
   > interactively in isolation...


Michael Chisnall:
   I don't see this at all.  What has typing got to do with testing
   program components.  It seems to me that far more important than
   the type system is whether the language is declarative (i.e highly
   modular) or not.  ...

Am I the only one interested in pointing out that an infinite loop is
a type error?  Consider a recent bug I encountered:  a 'continue' inside
an 'if' statement which should have been outside -- without the
continue the code would occasionally fall through to a different state
and would never terminate.  Yeah, that was in C, but testing is the
only real good way to find statements out of order.

Raul Rockwell