Re: Errors and Type checking.

jlg@cochiti.lanl.gov (J. Giles) writes:
> Most errors are not syntactic or static semantic errors (like type
> errors). The vast majority of debugging time is spent isolating and
> correcting problems which are not - and cannot be - found by the
> typechecks no matter how strict your type system is.


I can confirm this from experience with languages that do not check types
at all (e.g. Forth). I have not found type errors to be a problem. There
are two reasons for this:


1) I make fewer type errors than when programming in a compile-time
type-checked language. I.e., I am more careful. It probably takes a bit of
time to develop that programming mode.


2) When I make a type error, it is usually easy to catch and correct (It
helps if the language is interactive).


I think the more problematic type errors are those that the type checker
does not check, e.g. a search tree that is not sorted. Of course, this
sort of error could be caught with compile-time assertion checkers, but
somehow this technology has not caught on.


- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
--

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