Re: Can we factor out our type systems?

[Colin Putney <address@hidden>]

Quoting Joe Marshall <jrm@ccs.neu.edu>:

> "Peter J. Wasilko" <futurist@cloud9.net> writes:
> 
> > Would it be feasible to 'factor out' the type system (ie. the analysis
> > performed on type information explicitly or implicitly present in one's
> > code) and treat it as orthogonal to the rest of one's language design by
> > adopting some suitable optional type annotation convention that could be
> > drawn on by a number of alternative 'type checking plugins'?
> 
> I don't see why one couldn't *in principle* do this, but some of the
> statically typed languages have static typing so interwoven with the
> language that it simply makes no sense to talk about `factoring it
> out'.

Ah, but you could add it to an otherwise dynamically-typed language. This has
been brought up before, but it's worth saying again. Animorphic Smalltalk has
an *optional* static type system, which is orthogonal to both the class
hierarchy and the compiler/optimizer. At runtime, the system is dynamically
typed, but the development tools do static type analysis.

http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/projects/strongtalk/pages/index.html

My only quibble is that they tend to confuse the strong/weak and static/dynamic
typing dichotomies. It's a shame it was sacrificed to give us HotSpot.

Colin

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