declaration of variables?

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Joshua Marshall <jmarshal at mathworks.com>:
...
| Unit tests are generally written by humans, and may fail to fully test
| a program's behavior.  Personally, I find variable declarations
| useful.  (What I don't find useful is the ability in some languages to
| declare a variable without giving it an initial value.)

In a current thread on comp.lang.functional, Fergus Henderson posted
a very interesting analysis of attitudes about static typing versus
a political dichotomy presented in George Lakoff's ``Moral Politics.''
Lakoff contrasts a ``Principle of Reward and Punishment'' with a
``Principle of Altruism and Harm Minimization'', and Ferguson proposes
that static typing appeals to the latter.

Cf. http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=b2qse0%24dss%241%40mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU

For those who haven't had much contact with this crowd, static typing
there means type inference systems that actually do not generally declare
variables, but are on the other hand rather fastidiously type safe -
C++ by contrast is seen as rather anarchic.

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu