What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language

[Pascal Costanza]

David Hopwood wrote:
> Pascal Costanza wrote:
>> David Hopwood wrote:
>>> Marshall wrote:
>>>
>>>> The real question is, are there some programs that we
>>>> can't write *at all* in a statically typed language, because
>>>> they'll *never* be typable?
>>> In a statically typed language that has a "dynamic" type, all
>>> dynamically typed programs are straightforwardly expressible.
>> What about programs where the types change at runtime?
> 
> Staged compilation is perfectly compatible with static typing.
> Static typing only requires that it be possible to prove absence
> of some category of type errors when the types are known; it
> does not require that all types are known before the first-stage
> program is run.

Can you change the types of the program that is already running, or are 
the levels strictly separated?

> There are, however, staged compilation systems that guarantee that
> the generated program will be typeable if the first-stage program
> is.

...and I guess that this reduces again the kinds of things you can express.

> (It's clear that to compare the expressiveness of statically and
> dynamically typed languages, the languages must be comparable in
> other respects than their type system. Staged compilation is the
> equivalent feature to 'eval'.)

If it is equivalent to eval (i.e., executed at runtime), and the static 
type checker that is part of eval yields a type error, then you still 
get a type error at runtime!


Pascal

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