Marshall wrote: > Joe Marshall wrote: > >>They *do* have a related meaning. Consider this code fragment: >>(car "a string") >>[...] >>Both `static typing' and `dynamic typing' (in the colloquial sense) are >>strategies to detect this sort of error. > > > The thing is though, that putting it that way makes it seems as > if the two approaches are doing the same exact thing, but > just at different times: runtime vs. compile time. But they're > not the same thing. Passing the static check at compile > time is universally quantifying the absence of the class > of error; passing the dynamic check at runtime is existentially > quantifying the absence of the error. A further difference is > the fact that in the dynamically typed language, the error is > found during the evaluation of the expression; in a statically > typed language, errors are found without attempting to evaluate > the expression. > > I find everything about the differences between static and > dynamic to be frustratingly complex and subtle.
Let me add another complex subtlety, then: the above description misses an important point, which is that *automated* type checking is not the whole story. I.e. that compile time/runtime distinction is a kind of red herring. In fact, automated type checking is orthogonal to the question of the existence of types. It's perfectly possible to write fully typed programs in a (good) dynamically-checked language. In a statically-checked language, people tend to confuse automated static checking with the existence of types, because they're thinking in a strictly formal sense: they're restricting their world view to what they see "within" the language. Then they look at programs in a dynamically-checked language, and see checks happening at runtime, and they assume that this means that the program is "untyped". It's certainly close enough to say that the *language* is untyped. One could also say that a program, as seen by the language, is untyped. But a program as seen by the programmer has types: the programmer performs (static) type inference when reasoning about the program, and debugs those inferences when debugging the program, finally ending up with a program which has a perfectly good type scheme. It's may be messy compared to say an HM type scheme, and it's usually not proved to be perfect, but that again is an orthogonal issue. Mathematicians operated for thousands of years without automated checking of proofs, so you can't argue that because a dynamically-checked program hasn't had its type scheme proved correct, that it somehow doesn't have types. That would be a bit like arguing that we didn't have Math until automated theorem provers came along. These observations affect the battle over terminology in various ways. I'll enumerate a few. 1. "Untyped" is really quite a misleading term, unless you're talking about something like the untyped lambda calculus. That, I will agree, can reasonably be called untyped. 2. "Type-free" as suggested by Chris Smith is equally misleading. It's only correct in a relative sense, in a narrow formal domain which ignores the process of reasoning about types which is inevitably performed by human programmers, in any language. 3. A really natural term to refer to types which programmers reason about, even if they are not statically checked, is "latent types". It captures the situation very well intuitively, and it has plenty of precedent -- e.g. it's mentioned in the Scheme reports, R5RS and its predecessors, going back at least a decade or so (haven't dug to check when it first appeared). 4. Type theorists like to say that "universal" types can be used in a statically-typed language to subsume "dynamic types". Those theorists are right, the term "dynamic type", with its inextricable association with runtime checks, definitely gets in the way here. It might be enlightening to rephrase this: what's really happening is that universal types allow you to embed a latently-typed program in a statically-checked language. The latent types don't go anywhere, they're still latent in the program with universal types. The program's statically-checked type scheme doesn't capture the latent types. Describing it in these terms clarifies what's actually happening. 5. Dynamic checks are only part of the mechanism used to verify latent types. They shouldn't be focused on as being the primary equivalent to static checks. The closest equivalent to the static checks is a combination of human reasoning and testing, in which dynamic checks play an important but ultimately not a fundamental part. You could debug a program and get the type scheme correct without dynamic checks, it would just be more difficult. So, will y'all just switch from using "dynamically typed" to "latently typed", and stop talking about any real programs in real programming languages as being "untyped" or "type-free", unless you really are talking about situations in which human reasoning doesn't come into play? I think you'll find it'll help to reason more clearly about this whole issue. Thanks for your cooperation!! Anton -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
