s-expressions plus type annotation (was Re: Icon)

[Doug Orleans <address@hidden>]

Shriram Krishnamurthi writes:
 > Vanier asks about type annotation in addition to type inference.
 > 
 > 1. MrSpidey (soon to be replaced by MrFlow) lets you write explicit
 >    type-like annotations.  No big deal.
 > 
 > 2. Andrew Wright once built an s-expression front-end for ML -- ScML,
 >    pronounced "scum ML" --, but it's over a decade old, and has
 >    probably rotted away.

Kawa (http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/) is a Scheme implementation
(written in Java, and providing an easy interface to Java classes)
that lets you declare the types of variables
(http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/kawa_9.html#SEC54)
as well as the parameter types and return types of lambdas
(http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/kawa_8.html#SEC31).
Among other things, it helps disambiguate Java's static-type-based
method overloading.

--dougo@ccs.neu.edu