Donn Cave <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Quoth [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Alex Martelli): > ... > | Haskell's a great language, but beware: its static typing is NOT > | optional -- it's rigorous. It can INFER types for you (just like, say, > | boo), that's a different issue. It also allows bounded genericity at > | compile time (like, say, C++'s templates without the hassles), and > | that's yet another (typeclasses are a great mechanism, btw). > > He didn't dwell much on it, but there was some mention of type > inference, kind of as though that could be taken for granted. > I guess this would necessarily be much more limited in scope > than what Haskell et al. do.
Assuming that by "he" you mean GvR, I think I saw that too, yes. And yes, a language and particularly a typesystem never designed to facilitate inferencing are hard-to-impossible to retrofit with it in as thorough a way as one that's designed around the idea. (Conversely, making a really modular system work with static typing and inferencing is probably impossible; in practice, the type inferencer must examine all code, or a rather copious summary of it... it can't really work module by module in a nice, fully encapsulated way...). Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
