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From: hall@aplcenmp.apl.jhu.edu (Marty Hall)
Subject: Re: Why typing?
Message-ID: <DFBCKn.7os@aplcenmp.apl.jhu.edu>
Organization: JHU/APL AI Lab, Hopkins P/T CS Faculty
References: <43rcpn$26re@info4.rus.uni-stuttgart.de> <19950921T152258Z@naggum.no> <BLUME.95Sep21153818@atomic.cs.princeton.edu>
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 1995 15:33:58 GMT
Lines: 27
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.software-eng:37222 comp.lang.functional:6444 comp.lang.lisp:19178

In article <BLUME.95Sep21153818@atomic.cs.princeton.edu> 
blume@atomic.cs.princeton.edu (Matthias Blume) writes:
[...]
>When I still was a Scheme addict I used to believe in this, too.  But
>after programming extensively in SML I now have to say that this is
>not true at all.  Early _complete_ error checking leads (at least for
>me) to a huge decrease in development time.

I have been and continue to do a majority of my professional
development work in Lisp (the remainder in C), and like the dynamic
typing aspect. But for those who haven't tried SML, it really is worth
looking at. I have considered the strongly typed aspect of other
strongly typed languages a pain, but SML has 
(A) A very smart type inferencing system, so declarations are
    surprisingly minimal.
(B) A very powerful type system (unlike other strongly typed languages
    I've seen) so that the strong typing seems like much less of a
    restriction once you get used to it.
When I first used it I thought the strong typing would get in the way
and was very pleasantly surprised. And unlike C++, you *really* cannot
have type errors at runtime. 

I still prefer Lisp personally (for other reasons :-), but SML
convinced me that my "strong typing is never worth it" attitude was
wrong. 
						- Marty
(proclaim '(inline skates))
