"Marshall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Yes, an important question (IMHO the *more* important question > than the terminology) is what *programs* do we give up if we > wish to use static typing? I have never been able to pin this > one down at all.
Well, given Turing Machine equivalence... I'd mention retrospective software. But you can always implement the wanted retrospective features as a layer above the statically typed language. So the question is how much work the programmer needs to do to implement a given program with static typing or with dynamic typing. > The real question is, are there some programs that we > can't write *at all* in a statically typed language, because > they'll *never* be typable? I think there might be, but I've > never been able to find a solid example of one. More than *never* typable, you want to identify some kind of software that is not *economically* statically typable. Was it costlier to develop the software developed in non statically typed programming languages than in a statically typed programming language? -- __Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/ "I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a Bat-Leth contest. They will not concern us again." -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
