What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language

[Pascal Costanza]

Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> Pascal Costanza schrieb:
>> (It's really important to understand that the idea is to use this for 
>> deployed programs - albeit hopefully in a more structured fashion - 
>> and not only for debugging. The example I have given is an extreme one 
>> that you would probably not use as such in a "real-world" setting, but 
>> it shows that there is a boundary beyond which static type systems 
>> cannot be used in a meaningful way anymore, at least as far as I can 
>> tell.)
> 
> As soon as the running program can be updated, the distinction between 
> "static" (compile time) and "dynamic" (run time) blurs.
> You can still erect a definition for such a case, but it needs to refer 
> to the update process, and hence becomes language-specific. In other 
> words, language-independent definitions of dynamic and static typing 
> won't give any meaningful results for such languages.
> 
> I'd say it makes more sense to talk about what advantages of static vs. 
> dynamic typing can be applied in such a situation.
> E.g. one interesting topic would be the change in trade-offs: making 
> sure that a type error cannot occur becomes much more difficult 
> (particularly if the set of available types can change during an 
> update), so static typing starts to lose some of its appeal; OTOH a good 
> type system can give you a lot of guarantees even in such a situation, 
> even if it might have to revert to the occasional run-time type check, 
> so static checking still has its merits.

I am not opposed to this view. The two examples I have given for things 
that are impossible in static vs. dynamic type systems were 
intentionally extreme to make the point that you have to make a choice, 
that you cannot just blindly throw (instances of) both approaches 
together. Static type systems potentially change the semantics of a 
language in ways that cannot be captured by dynamically typed languages 
anymore, and vice versa.

There is, of course, room for research on performing static type checks 
in a running system, for example immediately after or before a software 
update is applied, or maybe even on separate type checking on software 
increments such that guarantees for their composition can be derived. 
However, I am not aware of a lot of work in that area, maybe because the 
static typing community is too focused on compile-time issues.

Personally, I also don't think that's the most interesting issue in that 
area, but that's of course only a subjective opinion.


Pascal

-- 
3rd European Lisp Workshop
July 3 - Nantes, France - co-located with ECOOP 2006
http://lisp-ecoop06.bknr.net/