Re: Experience with Large Applications in Lua?

["Steve Donovan" <sjdonova@...>]

>>> ikolev@abac.com 07/07/04 08:50AM >>>
>However, I found that with the increasing of the amount of code, one
>discovers why most languages have things like type checking or
>class/struct declarations.

An interesting perspective from Robert C. Martin:

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4639

In a nutshell: we need strong testing, not strong typing.
Bruce Eckel seems to have come to that conclusion:

http://mindview.net/WebLog/log-0025

>You can also put documentation in the descriptor, making it easier
for
>the user of a library to discover its interface.

Now that's a cool idea.  Every function carries its own documentation.

>All the checks of course can be done at run-time only, not at compile
>time, so a good unit testing system with coverage would be needed
too...

Absolutely.  It's true that dynamically typed languages are strongly
typed,
but a Pascal person would miss the ability to say that an integer was
only valid for 1 to 10, or that an array was not valid outside a
range.
But surely standard Lua tricks could be used to enforce this kind
of more precise run-time typing?

steve d.




-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support.