RE: Macros and little languages

[Matthias Felleisen <address@hidden>]

At Thu, 30 May 2002 01:22:19 -0400, "Anton van Straaten" wrote:
> >
> > Actually, it isn't so easy to imagine this.  Your imagination's
> > picture is probably of a world with Pascal or Fortran libraries.  We
> > live in a higher-order world, whether we use ML, Python or Java.
> > Think callbacks.
> 
> Could you expand a bit on what you're saying?  Is it simply that providing
> an untyped function as an argument to a typed function means that the typed
> function can no longer be guaranteed to be typesafe?

1. Safety and types are barely related. PERIOD. PLT Scheme is safe. I
think Perl is safe. There are plenty of pythonistas around to speak up
on the issue.

2. If your library supports first-class functions, how do you exploit 
and use the type information? How do you do separate type checking? 
It is indeed similar to calling from language A to language B but 
for an LL language (is this the ll1 mailing list?) it should be a "no
overhead" operation to call between the two parts of the language. 

-- Matthias