Re: in defense of types

[Jeffrey Palm <address@hidden>]

Quoting Matthias Felleisen <matthias@ccs.neu.edu>:

> 
> In a recent posting, which I promptly lost, Paul Graham, challenged
> the
> usefulness of static typing in programming languages. I'd like to take
> him up on this aspect of PLs.
> 
> [Note: For those of you who know me from academic venues, 
>  you will note that I "play Paul" there, but for very different 
>  reasons. We need to challenge each other on such statements 
>  because only strong challenges to scientific claims will ensure
>  that these claims are 'hardened'. So, if you want to know what's
> wrong
>  with types and the influence of the type research community, go to
> academic
>  conferences.]
> 
> So here we go. Static types are necessary 
>  (1) to establish basic properties of software
> and
>  (2) to establish absolute yet cheap abstraction boundaries between
> modules. 
> LL languages suffer from the lack of types, for this very purpose. 
> 
> ...
>
> -- Matthias

Static types can also lead to better program understanding:

 http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/roc/public/ICSE97-Final.ps

and optimization:

 ftp://ftp.diku.dk/diku/users/henglein/tagging-optimization.dvi.gz
 http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~diwan/toplas.ps

Jeff

---
Jeffrey Palm --> http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~jdp