Generics

Daniel Joyce daniel.a.joyce at worldnet.att.net
Mon Sep 29 15:31:04 UTC 2003


>
> I'd love to know about it, as well.
>
> By the way, there is a lightweight experiment that anyone can do for
> themselves, if you have a bug log available.  Go through the last n bugs
> (50, 100, 200, whatever your patience allows), and mark whether they
> would be have been solvable through a static type checker, i.e. the
> error involved treating an Apple as a Banana.
>
> I tried this once and went through the 40 most recent Squeak [FIX]
> reports, and indeed found that there are quite few type errors.  At the
> top of the list, IIRC, were things like:
>
> 	- sending messages no nil, i.e. uninitialized variables
>
> 	- the program simply does the wrong thing.  It doesn't crash.

	Not necessarily catchable by static typing either. Perhaps your types are 
cast correctly, but the code/objects implementing them have bugs. You can 
cast all you want in Java, but if the objects are bad, it still won't run 
properly. Static typechecking will not fix this.

	-Daniel

>
>
> 40 is too few to publish, and I never have free time to do a better job,
> so I didn't share the "result" very widely.  But try it yourself.  It's
> nice having a feel for the things that go wrong.
>
>
> -Lex

-- 

The Meek shall inherit the Earth,
for the Brave are among the Stars!



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