[racket] typed racket and new racket languages?

From: Sam Tobin-Hochstadt (samth at ccs.neu.edu)
Date: Fri Jun 17 19:24:54 EDT 2011

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 4:19 PM, Raoul Duke <raould at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 6:17 PM, Richard Lawrence
> <richard.lawrence at berkeley.edu> wrote:
>>> tho i read that even if there are ways to use it, there be dragons in
>>> terms of getting the new language just right wrt type enforcement.
>>
>> Where did you read this?
>
> possibly misunderstood the intention behind:
>
> http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/Thoughts/Racket_is____.html
>
> "To summarize, the creation of a safe language demands a lot of
> attention from the language designer. First, it demands a thorough
> understanding of the invariants that a language should come with.
> Second, it calls for a prediction as to where modules in this language
> will be used so that the language can be equipped with mechanism that
> enforces the invariants in all contexts. Providing support for the
> creation of such enforcement mechanisms is one of the research themes
> of PLT."

There big issue Matthias is raising in his essay is how do different
languages interact.  Fortunately, if you're building on top of Typed
Racket, the type checker already takes care of ensuring its own
invariants.  So all you have to worry about is (a) satisfying the type
checker and (b) making your language work correctly.

Things get more complicated if you're building a new, parallel,
language, which you want to interoperate with Typed Racket, for
example the `lazy' language, without building on Typed Racket
directly, but that doesn't sound like what you're working on.
-- 
sam th
samth at ccs.neu.edu


Posted on the users mailing list.