From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,a92e43963a6b930f X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news3.google.com!feeder.news-service.com!newsfeed.straub-nv.de!open-news-network.org!newsfeed01.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!news.belwue.de!newsfeed.arcor.de!newsspool1.arcor-online.net!news.arcor.de.POSTED!not-for-mail Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:21:00 +0200 From: Georg Bauhaus User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100608 Thunderbird/3.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: N best things about Ada? References: <97691fd2-7411-4ccc-bc7b-290aca633cd5@z30g2000prg.googlegroups.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <4c3ca07c$0$6889$9b4e6d93@newsspool2.arcor-online.net> Organization: Arcor NNTP-Posting-Date: 13 Jul 2010 19:21:00 CEST NNTP-Posting-Host: f15c2cb1.newsspool2.arcor-online.net X-Trace: DXC=@g`oTa?lCc2lIh70@:Lh>_cHTX3j=Fd^>?< X-Complaints-To: usenet-abuse@arcor.de Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:12387 Date: 2010-07-13T19:21:00+02:00 List-Id: On 13.07.10 18:18, Warren wrote: > There is nothing better than early bug detection! Indeed! Finding type errors in trace output after run-time is another way of type checking. I don't find it so productive. But it is both popular and respectable, since, for example, Python applications on Google App Engine work that way. And it does work. Most of the time. If you develop the skills to guess correctly ... So your argument doesn't carry enough weight: Google is big, GAE is inexpensive at first, Python is reasonably popular. This all shows there *is* something better than early bug detection! Don't bother with early type checking performed by language translators. Learn how to write correct code, instead! Use test cases! O.K., they work a little different in the testing environment... Phew. Sorry. I guess you see what I'm currently doing. I should take notes of the minutes spent in finding stupid mistakes like mixing str/unicode + encoding vs binary strings vs strings of limited size, the latter being a restriction that is enforced after deployment only. Yes, most of this can be explained. But it could be enforced by a compiler, using type checking ... How much does type checking save? Can this be spelled out in time and money?