Type inference in ruby

ruby-talk
1

Lähettäjä: Eric Anderson <eric@afaik.us>
Aihe: Re: Type inference in ruby

Trevor Andrade wrote:
> I was wondering whether it would be possible to have a type inference system
> in ruby. My question was asked before

I am sure it is possible to implement but I think most people end up
wondering why do it? If you want a typed system (strong or weak) there
are plenty of languages that support it natively. For me that is one of
the reasons I left those other languages. For me a type system has too
much coding overhead without much benefit. The two advantages are:

* Catches type errors
* Possibly better optimizations

To answer the first advantage Ruby encourages Unit testing. Unit testing
it 10 times better than type checking because it can not only check for
valid types but also check for logic errors. So why spend the overhead
of a type system when unit testing is better.

The second advantage again isn't an issue for me. Ruby is fast enough.
If I need it faster I can profile the code to find bottlenecks. If I
need it even faster I can recode the bottlenecks in C. Again, the
overhead of a type system is not worth even the possibility of better
optimizations.

A TI system could be implemented as a separate library to be run
on some code rather than as a part of that code, as an additional
testing facility.

That being said, I think it may be too much trouble for little gain.

Just my two cents,

Eric

E