Re: Parameter Modes, In In Out and Out

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Fri, 12 Jan 2001 mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <93n2gk$amr$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > In article <3A5E4DE3.C4D55B70@brighton.ac.uk>,
> >   John English <je@brighton.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> > > Indeed. Java has to be rejected (no MI)
> >
> > It is interesting to note that there is a strong camp in the
> > object oriented world that is very much opposed to MI,
> > precisely on the grounds that it destroys the simple clean
> > model of inheritance :-)
> 
> There's also a faction that opposes Java's static strong typing.
> 
> I believe the argument is in the context of dynamic distributed
> computing, but I don't understand it well enough to summarize it.

I think the argument is actually simple, and you can reduce it to
considering the case of input/output. If you want to read "objects" 
stored in some persistent memory by some other program how do you
statically determine their type? Well, the simple answer is, you don't, 
you use dynamic typing. Yes, I've dramatically oversimplified but that's 
it in a nutshell. 

Being an impurist, my response is that type safe object IO is probably
a good example of where dynamic typing should be integrated into a
statically typed language, but that static typing should be the default. 

-- Brian