Squeak-dev Digest, Vol 22, Issue 20

Andreas Nilsson wahboh at mac.com
Sat Oct 16 00:07:52 UTC 2004


See, that's where I hit the limit of my theoretic understanding of type 
systems ;)
But Smalltalk is strongly typed, right, every object has a type from 
when it was created.
Being deliberately naive one might say that all you'd have to do is 
follow all objects from creation and you'd be able to tell if a 
specific message send would fail or not.
The question then is when to do this, as you don't even have a compile 
cycle when adding methods, changing code that sends messages etc.
It probably has to be done live, when editing, as everything else in 
Smalltalk. My best guess is that it's performance reasons that's 
stopping people from even trying.

/Adde

On 2004-10-16, at 01.40, Tim Rowledge wrote:

> Andreas Nilsson <wahboh at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> There are things about static type checking that I miss when
>> programming in dynamically typed languages, for example warnings about
>> missing methods, indeed there are things that I'm glad to get rid of
>> too.
> How would you detect a missing method in a dynamic system? Aside from
> the trivial case of there being no method at all of the appropriate 
> name
> (which Smalltalks detect already) what would you do?
>
>
> tim
> --
> Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
> Strange OpCodes: LD: Lose Device
>




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