What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language

[Joe Marshall]

Chris Smith wrote:
> Joe Marshall <eval.apply at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Chris Smith wrote:
> > >
> > > Knowing that it'll cause a lot of strenuous objection, I'll nevertheless
> > > interject my plea not to abuse the word "type" with a phrase like
> > > "dynamically typed".
> >
> > Allow me to strenuously object.  The static typing community has its
> > own set of
> > terminology and that's fine.  However, we Lisp hackers are not used to
> > this terminology.
> > It confuses us.  *We* know what we mean by `dynamically typed', and we
> > suspect *you* do, too.
>
> I know what you mean by types in LISP.  The phrase "dynamically typed,"
> though, was explicitly introduced as a counterpart to "statically
> typed" in order to imply (falsely) that the word "typed" has related
> meanings in those two cases.

They *do* have a related meaning.  Consider this code fragment:
(car "a string")

Obviously this code is `wrong' in some way.  In static typing terms, we
could say that
we have a type error because the primitive procedure CAR doesn't
operate on strings.
Alternatively, we could say that since Lisp has one universal type (in
static type terms)
the code is correctly statically typed - that is, CAR is defined on all
input, but it's definition is to raise a runtime exception when passed
a string.

But regardless of which way you want to look at it, CAR is *not* going
to perform its usual computation and it is *not* going to return a
value.  The reason behind this is that you cannot take the CAR of a
string.  A string is *not* a valid argument to CAR.  Ask anyone why and
they will tell you `It's the wrong type.'

Both `static typing' and `dynamic typing' (in the colloquial sense) are
strategies to detect this sort of error.

> Nevertheless, I did not really object,
> since it's long since passed into common usage,

Exactly.  And you are far more likely to encounter this sort of usage
outside of a type theorist's convention.


> until Torben attempted
> to give what I believe are rather meaningless definitions to those
> words, in terms of some mythical thing called "type violations" that he
> seems to believe exist apart from any specific type systems.

It's hardly mythical.  (car "a string") is obviously an error and you
don't need a static type system to know that.

> > > This cleaner terminology eliminates a lot of confusion.
> >
> > Hah!  Look at the archives.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean here.  You would like me to look at the
> archives of which of the five groups that are part of this conversation?
> In any case, the confusion I'm referring to pertains to comparison of
> languages, and it's already been demonstrated once in the half-dozen or
> so responses to this branch of this thread.

I mean that this has been argued time and time again in comp.lang.lisp
and probably the other groups as well.  You may not like the fact that
we say that Lisp is dynamically typed, but *we* are not confused by
this usage.  In fact, we become rather confused when you say `a
correctly typed program cannot go wrong at runtime' because we've seen
plenty of runtime errors from code that is `correctly typed'.

> > >  If types DON'T mean a compile-time method for proving the
> > > absence of certain program behaviors, then they don't mean anything at
> > > all.
> >
> > Nonsense.
>
> Please accept my apologies for not making the context clear.  I tried to
> clarify, in my response to Pascal, that I don't mean that the word
> "type" can't have any possible meaning except for the one from
> programming language type theory.  I should modify my statement as
> follows:
>
>     An attempt to generalize the definition of "type" from programming
>     language type theory to eliminate the requirement that they are
>     syntactic in nature yields something meaningless.  Any concept of
>     "type" that is not syntactic is a completely different thing from
>     static types.

Agreed.  That is why there is the qualifier `dynamic'.  This indicates
that it is a completely different thing from static types.

> Basically, I start objecting when someone starts comparing "statically
> typed" and "dynamically typed" as if they were both varieties of some
> general concept called "typed".  They aren't.

I disagree.  There is clearly a concept that there are different
varieties of data and they are not interchangable.  In some languages,
it is up to the programmer to ensure that mistakes in data usage do not
happen.  In other languages, the computer can detect such mistakes and
prevent them.  If this detection is performed by syntactic analysis
prior to running the program, it is static typing.  Some languages like
Lisp defer the detection until the program is run.  Call it what you
want, but here in comp.lang.lisp we tend to call it `dynamic typing'.

>  Furthermore, these two
> phrases were invented under the misconception that that are.  If you
> mean something else by types, such as the idea that a value has a tag
> indicating its range of possible values, then I tend to think it would
> be less confusing to just say "type" and then clarify the meaning it
> comes into doubt, rather than adopting language that implies that those
> types are somehow related to types from type theory.

You may think it would be less confusing, but if you look at the
archives of comp.lang.lisp you would see that it is not.

We're all rubes here, so don't try to educate us with your
high-falutin' technical terms.