Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uupsi!ficc!peter
From: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: Dynamic typing (part 3)
Message-ID: <J+FAO+5@xds13.ferranti.com>
Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva)
Organization: Xenix Support, FICC
References: <626@optima.cs.arizona.edu> <1991Mar13.163629.12630@engage.enet.dec.com> <962@mgt3.sci.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 91 22:55:42 GMT

In article <962@mgt3.sci.UUCP> dc@mgt3.sci.com (D. C. Sessions) writes:
> The upshot of this little affair was the conversion of an entire shop 
> full of C hackers into Modula-2 fanatics, purely because they *never* 
> wanted to give up intermodule type-safety again.

My response is "convert to ANSI C, which gives you intermodule type safety".

> So: for the purposes of the current discussion, how do our ideal 
> dynamically-typed languages ensure that a similar little 
> misunderstanding doesn't happen again?

That's easy: the function that gets a foo wouldn't misinterpret it as being
a bar in the first place. It'd either have kicked out an error, or the test
for bar.magic would have failed.
-- 
Peter da Silva.  `-_-'  peter@ferranti.com
+1 713 274 5180.  'U`  "Have you hugged your wolf today?"
