OT: Languages and type systems (was RE: Settlers ...)

["Andrei de A. Formiga" <archimedes_siracusa@...>]

   I don't find it surprising that people think
statically-typed languages are so unconvenient,
because they are exposed only to C, C++, Java and the
like. There are high-level and very high-level
languages with more advanced static type systems, and
these languages are bridging the expressiveness gap
between dynamically and statically-typed languages.
You don't even need to declare the types explicitly :)
The magic is called "type inference" and is a
technique known since the 70s. 

   Interested parties should look at OCaml (good
tutorial at
http://merjis.com/developers/ocaml_tutorial/), a fast,
natively and bytecode-compiled functional language
with OO constructs (classes and objects). There is a
very good compiler for a similar language called
Standard ML; the compiler is MLton (www.mlton.org). 

   Also, there's Haskell (www.haskell.org). Although
not quite efficient as current ML dialects, it's very
high level and has a good native-code compiler (ghc).

   Well, it's good to know what's out there...

---
[]s, Andrei Formiga 

--- Nick Trout <nick@rockstarvancouver.com> wrote:

> Philip Plumlee wrote:
> 
> > My pet theory is that static typing is good for
> low-level code, and
> > dynamic typing good for high-level code.
> > 
> 
> That's kind of self forfilling. I think the best
> solution is a language
> which offers both. It's pains me to say it but I
> think languages like C#
> are a step in the right direction, although I don't
> think C# is really
> dynamic, or high level, it just has more
> introspection, GC etc over
> things like C++. I much prefer programming in Python
> to looking at C# as
> it's so productive. You don't (I think) have mapping
> types and lists etc
> in C# which are nearly as flexible as languages like
> Lua, Python, Perl
> etc.
> 



		
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