Subject: Re: Harlequin changing focus (was Re: changing focus...)
From: rpw3@rigden.engr.sgi.com (Rob Warnock)
Date: 1998/12/04
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <747gq6$3u63@fido.engr.sgi.com>
Andrew Shalit  <alms@shore.net> wrote:
+---------------
| thornley@visi.com (David Thornley) writes:
| > A recent book by Capers Jones states that no studies have found
| > static typing to produce fewer errors than dynamic typing...
| 
| I'd be very interested in a more complete reference for the
| Capers Jones claim, if you have it handy.
+---------------

I don't have that one, but there was a *very* old paper by Bill Wulf
at CMU about an analysis of observed user errors in the BLISS language
(truly typeless data), which claimed that "type errors" were found in
practice to be almost non-existent (compared to other errors such as
misplaced semicolons, misplaced or missing "." [the BLISS deferencing
operator], etc.). Part of this was that BLISS had a superb macro facility
(although not as nice as Lisp's!) and a very generic user-programmable
"structure" facility (syntactically an array-definition, but the access
method could be any BLISS expression), and the two worked together
*extremely* well. 


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, 8L-855		rpw3@sgi.com
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