What is a type error?

[Chris Smith]

Marshall <marshall.spight at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, these *performance* issues make assignment prohibitive for
> real-world use, at least if we are talking about data management
> in the large. This is not the same thing as saying the resulting
> language is a toy language, though; its semantics are quite
> interesting and possibly a better choice for *defining* the semantics
> of the imperative operations than directly modelling the imperative
> operations. (Or maybe not.) In any event, it's worth thinking about,
> even if performance considerations make it not worth implementing.

My "toy language" comment was directed at a language that I mistakenly 
thought you were proposing, but that you really weren't.  You can ignore 
it, and all the corresponding comments about assignment being less 
powerful, etc.  I was apparently not skilled at communication when I 
tried to say that in the last message.

It is, perhaps, worth thinking about.  My assertion here (which I think 
I've backed up, but there's been enough confusion that I'm not surprised 
if it was missed) is that the underlying reasons that performance might 
be poor for this language are a superset of the performance problems 
caused by aliasing.  Hence, when discussing the problems caused by 
aliasing for the performance of language implementations (which I 
believe was at some point the discussion here), this isn't a 
particularly useful example.

It does, though, have the nice property of hiding the aliasing from the 
semantic model.  That is interesting and worth considering, but is a 
different conversation; and I don't know how to start it.

-- 
Chris Smith - Lead Software Developer / Technical Trainer
MindIQ Corporation