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 UAA32573; Sat, 31 Aug 2002 20:01:51 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id UAA00042 for caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr; Sat, 31 Aug 2002 20:01:49 +0200 (MET DST) 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 QAA07865 for ; Fri, 30 Aug 2002 16:05:45 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from dirf.bris.ac.uk (dirf.bris.ac.uk [137.222.10.72]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id g7UE5iD14995 for ; Fri, 30 Aug 2002 16:05:44 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from cs.bris.ac.uk (actually host lunaleka.cs.bris.ac.uk) by dirf.bris.ac.uk with SMTP-PRIV with ESMTP; Fri, 30 Aug 2002 15:05:33 +0100 Received: from hua.cs.bris.ac.uk (hua [137.222.102.70]) by cs.bris.ac.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA17838; Fri, 30 Aug 2002 15:04:09 +0100 (BST) Received: from localhost by hua.cs.bris.ac.uk (8.9.3) id PAA14312; Fri, 30 Aug 2002 15:04:08 +0100 (BST) Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 15:04:07 +0100 (BST) From: J Farrand X-X-Sender: To: Vitaly Lugovsky cc: David Frese , SooHyoung Oh , Caml-list Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Q: safe language In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On Fri, 30 Aug 2002, Vitaly Lugovsky wrote: > No. In this place program may be expecting some structure, which can > contain NIL. There is no other way in lisp to define structures - so, any > code accepting lists will accept any alien structure. Is is type safety? > No way! Dynamically typed languages can't be safe. "Safe" is not the same as "Type Safe". ISTR safe means that a program written in the language will not cause a machine level error. So for example, C is not safe because you can derefence a bad pointer etc. and cause a seg fault. LISP is safe. Even though you can apply a function to arguments of the wrong type, LISP has well defined behaviour for dealing with this. (That behaviour might just be that the runtime prints an error a halts the program, but still better than what C would do, which is basically anything...) -- Jim Farrand, ML Group, mailto:farrand@cs.bris.ac.uk Department of Computer Science, http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~farrand University of Bristol, tel: +44-(0)117-954-5254 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UB, UK ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners