What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language

[Pascal Costanza]

Rob Thorpe wrote:
> Pascal Costanza wrote:
>> Matthias Blume wrote:
>>> Pascal Costanza <pc at p-cos.net> writes:
>>>> (slot-value p 'address) is an attempt to access the field 'address in
>>>> the object p. In many languages, the notation for this is p.address.
>>>>
>>>> Although the class definition for person doesn't mention the field
>>>> address, the call to (eval (read)) allows the user to change the
>>>> definition of the class person and update its existing
>>>> instances. Therefore at runtime, the call to (slot-value p 'adress)
>>>> has a chance to succeed.
>>> I am quite comfortable with the thought that this sort of evil would
>>> get rejected by a statically typed language. :-)
>> This sort of feature is clearly not meant for you. ;-P
> 
> To be fair though that kind of thing would only really be used while
> debugging a program.
> Its no different than adding a new member to a class while in the
> debugger.
> 
> There are other places where you might add a slot to an object at
> runtime, but they would be done in tidier ways.

Yes, but the question remains how a static type system can deal with 
this kind of updates.


Pascal

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