Why does Dynamic Typing really matter?!?

[Jp Calderone]

On Fri, Feb 07, 2003 at 12:36:24AM +0000, Alex Martelli wrote:
> Jeremy Fincher wrote:
> > [snip]
> 
> How much signature based polymorphism does the language
> support?  That is one key question.  Haskell potentially offers a
> lot, if you get your typeclasses right; various ML dialects offer
> less, or none at all -- not supporting the concept of "classes of
> types" (Haskell's typeclasses), they thereby don't let functions
> you code be all that generic (except maybe in a few limit cases
> such as SML supporting + on both floats and ints by special
> casing).  

  Jeremy probably knows better than I, but doesn't Caml support a similar
system to Haskell's typeclasses?  I forget the name, but something to effect
of ...

  type <symbol> =
    <name0> of <type0>
  | <name1> of <type1>
  | ...;

  Once upon a time, I wrote a serializer in Caml, and I used these to write
generic functions for groups of types.

  Jp

-- 
#!/bin/bash
( LIST=(~/.netscape/sigs/*.sig)
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  echo --$'\n' `uptime` ) > ~/.netscape/.signature
-- 
 up 53 days, 3:50, 4 users, load average: 0.41, 0.40, 0.33
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