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Date:Mon Jun 30 15:10:47 1993 
Subject:Re: important article on typing 
From:jlc (Jonathan Cunningham) 
Volume-ID:930630.07 

> 
> In the news group comp.lang.dylan there is a debate going on about
> static vs dynamic typing.
> 
I see this as another example of the convergence of "live" programming
languages (ie those which are (a) in practical use and (b) are still
able to evolve).

As another side of the same coin, the June 1993 issue of "C++ report"
says that
    "... a mechanism for using run-time type information has been
    voted into C++ by the ANSI/ISO C++ standards committee."

I don't see explicit type declarations and a smart compiler able to
infer type information as being mutually exclusive, so I could
imagine a future situation in which a "lazy" C++ programmer wrote
a library using dynamic typing, but a smart compiler optimised it
to static typing (of course, you are not supposed to use dynamic
typing when you can use static).

The other side of that, is polishing Lisp (or pop11 etc.) code, by
putting in static type declarations etc. (to improve either safety
or efficiency or both), but not needing to bother if you know the
compiler can infer static type information.

Jonathan Cunningham