In that case, can you tell me what the square root of a string is?

There are basically two ways of solving that:

If C/Java/etc. were the state-of-the-art in type systems, I would be for latent types all the way. But C wasn't the state-of-the-art when it was designed (Hindley and Milner were already playing with type inferencing systems at the time), and type systems have been developed a lot since then.

It's OK for C to not reflect the state-of-the-art at the time, since it's a practical language to solve practical problems. Using brand new and unproven concepts in language design is not conductive to solving practical problems. But type inferencing has come a long way, so modern languages no longer have an excuse.

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.

In reply to Re: Static typing is mostly a waste of time by hardburn
in thread Static typing is mostly a waste of time by johnnywang

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.