🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <LIBERTE.91Apr16164831@babbage.ncsa.uiuc.edu> liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Daniel LaLiberte) writes:
> What are some other categories of problems that don't fit in existing
> static typing systems?  Is it possible to come up with a "fix" for
> these problems in the ideal language, or will dynamic typing always be
> "necessary", like goto is.  Can we organize these and maybe learn
> something about the problem?

Amazing! Someone else is actually trying to solve problems and make
programming easier, instead of arguing about exactly how hard it is!
I like this guy's attitude.

I propose we focus on just one problem: What should a type system look
like in order to allow everything people want to do with types? In other
words, what kinds of constraints should the programmer be able to
express upon objects (in the general sense, not the OO sense) in order
to achieve both safety and generality?

Let's not argue whether dynamic typing is necessary. Let's just do what
we have to so that it's obviously unnecessary. (Is that too upbeat for
comp.lang.misc readers?)

As a starting point: Ben, could you describe the Russell type system in
more detail, or point us to references? I think the basic idea makes
sense. If you apply certain operations to a value inside function f,
then f should specify the value as anything subject to those operations.

And, as a first sample problem to be solved by a typing system: How do
we write a generic, type-safe sorting routine? What's the best that
available languages can do to make this work? Remember, type-safe means
that the sort routine will never tell you ``can't apply < to glorps'' at
run-time, as a dynamically typed system would.

We may have to separate the issues of typing for storage management and
typing for typechecking/security/etc.

Followups to comp.lang.misc.

---Dan