On Thu, 15 Jun 2000 22:11:34 -0400, Andrew Hunt <andy / Toolshed.Com> wrote:
>    >>> So why not do this? Make Ruby a
>    >>> language with both static and dynamic type.
>
>An interesting thought, but one for another language.  Fatal 
>flaws of most languages seem to get introduced by committees :-)

Right... dylan does this, with its concept of "specialization".  I haven't
done extensive hacking in dylan, but it seems to work pretty well, except a
few holes I don't fully understand (I guess a polymorphic OO type system is a
tricky beast).

So I'd suggest people who are interested in this sort of thing check out
dylan, which was designed from the beginning for optional typing, and maybe
help out gwydion people, rather than trying to retrofit an existing language.

>Languages should be as small as possible, but no smaller,
>and never, ever, larger.

Right, and it's important to distinguish between "natural" evolutionary
extensions of a language and an attempt to squeeze in more ideas that weren't
part of the original design.


Static vs. dynamic is such a popular topic of debate I'm sort of surprised
more people don't have more comments on "have it both ways" designs like
dylan.  Maybe the compilers aren't developed well enough, or people are
confused by its OO design and multiple dispatch, who knows.