From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id KAA01503; Mon, 23 Apr 2001 10:12:26 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id KAA30029 for ; Mon, 23 Apr 2001 10:12:25 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from pauillac.inria.fr (pauillac.inria.fr [128.93.11.35]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f3N8CKf20613; Mon, 23 Apr 2001 10:12:20 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from xleroy@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id KAA01343; Mon, 23 Apr 2001 10:12:20 +0200 (MET DST) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 10:12:20 +0200 From: Xavier Leroy To: Jan Skibinski Cc: Jonathan Coupe , caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] OCaml related article Message-ID: <20010423101220.B517@pauillac.inria.fr> References: <000701c0cb33$e525bc40$a00bfea9@baby> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: ; from jans@numeric-quest.com on Sun, Apr 22, 2001 at 08:12:34AM -0400 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk > His conclusion though is that it is practically impossible > to introduce any kind of static typing to Perl. Dominus' claim is that if it could be done, it would still be largely useless: since Perl has so many context-dependent automatic coercions, nearly all programs would be correct, and the type system wouldn't help much finding programming errors. Actually, I believe one could do a soft typing system for Perl along the lines of Mr. Spidey for Scheme (http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/packages/mrspidey/), using constraint-based flow analysis. Of course, uses of "eval" would not be checked at all. But Dominus' point that it would be largely useless is probably true. > Contrast it > with http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~lex/ti/ti.html > where Lex Spoon attempts to deliver a type inference engine to > Smalltalk (sic!). Why not? Constraint-based flow analysis can be applied to Smalltalk (at least without the reflection features -- if you change the behavior of method invocation, all bets are off), and since Smalltalk has cleaner, more restrictive dynamic semantics than Perl, it could actually be useful in finding errors. - Xavier Leroy ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr. Archives: http://caml.inria.fr