Re: The World According to Lua: How To?

[skaller <skaller@...>]

On Sat, 2005-02-19 at 17:27, Russell Smith wrote:

> the biggest annoyance in writing a 5k line app is not the global/local
> problem (as others have pointed out, there are good ways to resolve
> that) but the fact that tables are not strongly typed: 

> of course this is a *feature* of Lua and is part of what makes writing
> small programs easy, 

But these days it is not necessary: with type inference
the code is just as simple but strongly typed.
For example:

Ocaml int list:      [1;2;3;4]
Felix int array:     [[ 1,2,3,4 ]]

both statically typed and just as simple to write.

Dynamic typing is usually just a hack to get around
a lack of three features: polymorphism, variants,
and lazy evaluation. The main legitimate use is 
lazy evaluation of code (which high performance
statically typed languages are usually not so good at).

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
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