Re: [stack] Parameters: ordered versus named

On Sep 9, 2007, at 19:06 , Christopher Diggins wrote:

> On 9/9/07, Don Groves <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> Thanks for the info. In what ways does Cat's inferred type system
>>>> differ?
>>>> --
>>>
>>> From what?
>>>
>>> -Christopher
>>
>> From an "uninferred" one. I'm thinking a large part of my problem is
>> lack of vocabulary. I tried to find a definition of an "inferred"  
>> type
>> system via Google but was unsuccessful.
>
> Some examples of languages with type inference are ML, OCaML, Haskell,
> F#, Scala, Boo, Nice, Cyclone, and of course Cat.
>
> Type inference (also known as type reconstruction) is not a property
> of the type system but rather a property of a language. Two languages
> can share a type system, whereas one requires type annotations (a.k.a
> type signatures) wheras another doesn't. Some type systems lend
> themselves to type inference (e.g. ML style type systems). Type
> inference is often achieved using what is known as the Hindley-Milner
> algorithm.
>
> Your most successful search keywords are going to be "type inference".
>
> Hope this helps,
> Christopher

Yes, it helps a lot! Having fried my brain for the last two hours  
reading
up on type inference, one thing stands out for the development of  
Catenate:
if I infer the type of a variable from its initialization literal,  
and restrict that
variable from ever holding a different type, then I can disable type  
checking
for compiled programs. I'm not thinking much about execution speed yet,
but doing this should speed up things considerably down the road.
--
Don

Programmer (n): an organism that turns coffee and cookies into software.