Re: dual-language systems increase modularity

[Pascal Costanza <address@hidden>]

On 17 Nov 2003, at 0:17, Matthias Felleisen wrote:

> (2) You want tools that help you infer and maintain "invariants" or 
> "structural
> relationships" among pieces of code.  This is where the entire LL 
> community
> falls short and just fails to see why we can't grow. We (PLT) has some 
> experience
> with that. We have had two Hindley-Milner soft typers (incl. Andrew's 
> Soft Scheme)
> and two SBA soft typers (incl MrSpidey). These tools are by no means 
> perfect and
> don't do enough.  But they are examples of what I mean when I say we 
> need to be
> able to write some thoughts down and have them checked when we modify 
> scripts
> that have grown too complex for our sake.  If we (LL) were to invest 
> in any joint
> infrastructure, then it is exactly that aspect that we should tackle.

The approach described in 
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/mens02maintaining.html seems very promising.

The problems I see with static type systems is each of them provides 
one specific set of type rules that is claimed to be general-purpose. A 
"light-weight" approach should be more flexible, IMHO, and this is what 
the authors of that papers are heading at: You can change the rules for 
a program and thus make them domain-specific.

Pascal

--
Tyler: "How's that working out for you?"
Jack: "Great."
Tyler: "Keep it up, then."