27 Nov
2007
27 Nov
'07
11:44 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great der Mouse once stated:
I did something like that in college. It had the benefit that I could
automatically determine which version of a word to apply (int_plus to add
ints, double_plus to add floats, string_plus to concatenate strings). But
adding such type information doubled the size of the stack, but it wasn't
that bad a trade off, even when I did it a dozen years ago (Unix
workstation).
-spc (Even made a Unix shell in the language, but the fact that I don't
use it should say something about it ... )
Type checking
is that last straw for many. It can't be a high level
language if it wasn't type checked, could it? Does type checking
really produce better error free code?
In my experience, it does, other things being equal. Which of course
they rarely are - has anyone built what for lack of a better term I
might call a typechecked FORTH engine? I don't really know FORTH as
well as I'd like, but my impression is that doing that would require
enough infrastructure that it would border on reinventing PostScript
(minus the rendering stuff, of course).