Re: dynamic vs. static typing

[Shriram Krishnamurthi <address@hidden>]

Joe Marshall wrote:

> If there is some feature of the language that cannot always be
> statically decided, and you are unwilling to restrict usage of the
> feature to the statically decidable cases, then there needs to be
> runtime support for that feature.  If there is runtime support for a
> feature, then static support of the same feature, however desirable,
> is no longer strictly necessary.

Surely I don't need to tell you that this is what well-designed (and
sound!) typed languages do.  For example, the type systems of most
typed languages don't even try to prove that array bounds will be
within checks.  The run-time systems of most typed languages therefore
insert array-bounds checks.

> ...but this is a caricature.  Any compiled language does *some*
> sort of static analysis.

I have to pick a nit with this terminology.  *Languages* are neither
compiled nor interpreted.  Individual implementations may take the
form of a compiler or interpreter (or god-knows-what these days).

Shriram