Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
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From: Rick Price <rickr@jts.com>
Subject: Lint For Smalltalk
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Date: Tue, 11 Jul 1995 13:53:10 GMT
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Why not make a lint program for smalltalk that to the best of it's 
ability checks to make sure that you really can send an object the 
message you want to send it. In this way you would have the strong type 
checking of C++ without losing the flexibility of smalltalk. I know that 
smalltalk will give you a message at run time. It would be nice to know 
at compile time that something was wrong.

I do not feel that the lack of strong type checking is a big problem. In 
C++ it is a royal pain to write really flexible things (caused by strong 
type checking). I suppose that templates make it easier, but it kind of 
bugs me to think that the compiler is going to generate even more code 
when it does not have to. 

After all we still have bugs in C++ programs. No matter how much the 
compiler does for you, it is still up to you to not *create* bugs. 

I find smalltalk much simpler than C++, which if used properly could 
reduce the number of bugs in the code.

