Re: [stack] sweetening concatenative syntax

Stevan Apter <[email protected]> wrote:
>  this is the sort of thing that makes me type-averse.  i understand that
>  proponents of types have their reasons, but i can't help thinking that it's
>  one of those things that language-designers like more than language-users.
>  one of the beauties of joy is that quotations are lists are programs, and
>  in some variants, are stacks.

There are two good things about types.

The first is that, implemented right, they can help you write code
(for example, Ada's attributes, c.f. e.g.
http://www.csupomona.edu/reference/ada/rm95html-1.0/rm9x-A-05-03.html).
Most people who design statically typed languages don't bother
thinking of how types could be helpful beyond simple static
polymorphism (or worse, overloading).

The second is that they help clarify our understanding of what a
language is doing. If an operation in a language cannot yet be typed,
we do not have a complete idea of what it's doing yet.

I'm not a static typing maniac, but I'm strongly in favor of figuring
out static types, and I've often enjoyed using static languages.

-Wm