Bruno Desthuilliers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Haskell - as other languages using type-inference like OCaml - are in > a different category. Yes, I know, don't say it, they are statically > typed - but it's mostly structural typing, not declarative > typing. Which makes them much more usable IMHO.
Some users in fact recommend writing an explicit type signature for every Haskell function, which functions sort of like a unit test. That doesn't bloat the code up noticibly. The conciseness of those languages comes more from polymorphism and convenient ways of writing and using higher-order functions, than from type inference. > Still, static typechecking is not a garantee against runtime > errors. Nor against logical errors. Right, however the reality is it does seem to prevent a lot of surprises. There's even an intermediate language (a language generated by a compiler as an intermediate step towards emitting machine code) called Henk, in which EVERY value is type-annotated (and in a very fancy type system too). The author reports that the annotations have been very helpful for noticing compiler bugs. > I'd have to see a concrete use case. And I'd need much more real-world > experience with some ML variant, but this is not something I can > expect to happen in a near future - it's difficult enough to convince > PHBs that Python is fine. Monad Reader #7 has an article about some Wall street company using ML: http://www.haskell.org/sitewiki/images/0/03/TMR-Issue7.pdf see the article by Yaron Minsky. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
