shiny uno version, Desktop IDL

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 10:42:39AM +0200, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
> On 06/14/2012 01:58 PM, Bjoern Michaelsen wrote:
> Actually writing down the static information can have a huge benefit
> on maintainability.  (Even in static languages with type inference
> like Haskell, where you would not actually need to write down type
> signatures, it is common practice to nevertheless do so especially
> for exported entities, for better documentation.)  Witness gbuild:
> we do run into cases there where a macro is called with more
> arguments than it expects, and at least I often need to decipher
> definitions (or worse, use "monkey see, monkey do" copy/paste) to
> figure out what arguments, and in what order, a macro takes.  I
> would *love* to have a more statically typed machinery there...

The problem with gbuild is not that it is dynamic typed, but that it is weakly
typed (everything is a string). Weak typing is a whole different issue and not
what I am suggesting. Testing an Any to be of a type able to provide what it
should at runtime is still a sane thing to do, and is done anyway most of the
time.

Best,

Bjoern