"no variable or argument declarations are necessary."

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> "Diez B. Roggisch" <deets at web.de> writes:
> >  - FPs share their own set of problems - try writing a server. The
> > have inherent troubles with event-driven programs.
>
> Erlang?

Guess what, worked with that, too :) And let me assure you - it does
have pretty much runtime type error issues. It's interpreted. I'm not
sure what the compiler/parser gets at loading a source file. And the
Mnesia distributed database lets you easily query the wrong values...
It's interesting, and it's concurrent programming paradigms are great.
But it's far from being perfect, and needs thourough testing before
deploying new code.

> > Still, FP is cool. But python too. And just attaching some
> > type-inference to python won't work.
>
> Yeah, I've figured declarations in Python would be more like Common
> Lisp's, i.e. optional, enforced at compile time only when the compiler
> can easily figure it out, and at runtime otherwise.

Easy cases are easy... The thing is: I'm all for typechecking as long
as it doesn't burden me. In FP it doesn't, as the expressional power is
way better. But in JAVA, it does. And just doing wishful-thinking about
that Python should do better that won't help... :)

Diez