[racket-dev] math collection [was: Hyperbolic functions]

FWIW, I agree with Robby and have had similar conversations with Sam
in person. (Although for me it is that I wish I had the ability to
claim that macro pieces had certain types regardless of what TR could
infer from the generated code.)

I think a big part of the Racket philosophy is that the programming
language implementer is not a member of an elite, enlightened caste
that can make choices mere mortals cannot. This philosophy is the root
of what I find beautiful about macros, continuations, first-class
synchronization, and structure type properties, for example.

Although I am not directly writing anything for the TR implementation,
I have opinions about the goal of that project. To me, it is not
"figure out a type system that is passable for Racket programs" but
"make a type system that is to existing type systems as Racket is to
pedestrian languages" ---- in particularly, by allowing more
extensions (type or otherwise) to be done in language.

I see Robby's point about contract / type isomorphism and mine about
more powerful type macros as steps in that direction.

<3

Jay

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 10:10 PM, Robby Findler
<robby at eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote:
> Consider me done!
>
> Robby
>
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 11:05 PM, Neil Toronto <neil.toronto at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I haven't got a clue what you two are arguing about anymore. If you both
>> stop, maybe Sam can implement that perfectly safe change to the typed ->
>> untyped contract barrier that he said he could do. That would be nice.
>>
>> ;)
>>
>> Neil ⊥
>>
>>
>> On 06/26/2012 09:23 PM, Robby Findler wrote:
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 10:08 PM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt<samth at ccs.neu.edu>
>>>  wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 10:44 PM, Robby Findler
>>>> <robby at eecs.northwestern.edu>  wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 9:25 PM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt<samth at ccs.neu.edu>
>>>>>  wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 9:29 PM, Robby Findler
>>>>>> <robby at eecs.northwestern.edu>  wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> This sounds like a terrible solution.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> There are lots of places in our system where we just declare facts and
>>>>>>> don't prove them and then use them for lots of things (often
>>>>>>> optimizations). Why should this one be special?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I don't know of any places like this in Racket.  What are you thinking
>>>>>> of?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> The inliner and the JIT compiler and that whole interaction are the
>>>>> ones I thought of. I should have said "lots of facts" not "lots of
>>>>> places", tho. Sorry about that.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I'm still not sure what you're thinking of.  What operation does the
>>>> inliner or JIT perform that is justified by a
>>>> programmer-declared-but-not-checked fact?
>>>
>>>
>>> There are many operations that are implemented partially in JIT and
>>> wholly in the runtime system. The JIT generated version gets used
>>> unless certain conditions hold, in which case the runtime system
>>> version gets used. The programmer declared fact is embedded into the
>>> code and not specified as a fact per se, but for example, there is one
>>> such fact saying "this pile of assembly instructions is equivalent to
>>> the C implementation of list-ref, under the condition that the number
>>> argument is a fixnum less than 10,000 and we don't run out of pairs
>>> too soon" (roughly). There are large pile of such things. Another one
>>> you're probably more familiar with: "this pile of assembly
>>> instructions is equivalent to + when the arguments are both fixnums or
>>> both flonums".
>>>
>>> There is another pile of such invariants in the (pre-bytecode level)
>>> inliner. It relies on beta substitution and the ability to run certain
>>> primitives at compile time. (I don't know as much about that one, so
>>> probably there are more things it relies on than that.)
>>>
>>>>>> Certainly, Typed Racket is intended to be sound in the same sense that
>>>>>> Racket is safe, and that Haskell, OCaml, and Java are safe as well: if
>>>>>> you don't use specifically-marked unsafe features (such as the FFI and
>>>>>> `racket/unsafe/ops`), then you get a guarantee that depends only on
>>>>>> the correctness of the runtime system/compiler, not on the correctness
>>>>>> of any user code.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Of course I understand this. I'm pointing out that this is not a
>>>>> significant guarantee, in and of itself (see last para below for an
>>>>> elaboration here).
>>>>>
>>>>>>  I think this a very important guarantee: we've seen
>>>>>> far too often that trusting user code in languages like C and C++ was
>>>>>> a big mistake in many contexts.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I don't think this is an either/or. Indeed, just to continue with C:
>>>>> if everyone understood that the types were really just size markers
>>>>> and nothing else, then lots of the seeming unsoundness goes away in C
>>>>> (not all, of course, and as I've been learning from Regehr's blog,
>>>>> there are lots of other dark corners). But no one is suggesting we
>>>>> remove checks from array bounds, which is what really cost society
>>>>> money wrt to C and, IMO, the kind of invariant that matters.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I don't think the distinction that you're trying to draw here is
>>>> meaningful.  In particular, to return to our earlier example, if you
>>>> assert the type Neil gave for an untyped value, backed up with the
>>>> contract `(->  real? real?)`, then Typed Racket's type system can be
>>>> off by arbitrarily much -- no claim it makes can be trusted.
>>>
>>>
>>> I think you're making this out to be a boogey man, when it really isn't.
>>>
>>> But why doesn't your argument apply to any program that uses the FFI?
>>> It also invalidates all of the guarantees that TR makes. (And there
>>> are essentially no programs that don't use the FFI anymore.)
>>>
>>> And anyways, I think that TR actually makes *no* guarantees in a
>>> precise technical sense. Even if I accept the proofs about the models
>>> in your papers then (as I said earlier) we are not running your
>>> models. Why should you be the only allowed to introduce these
>>> particular bugs? I'm allowed to introduce other bugs, for example.
>>>
>>>> Further,
>>>> the optimizer will happily transform your program from one that
>>>> behaves one way to a different program, and cause the entire Racket
>>>> runtime to segfault.  So if we went the route that you're suggesting,
>>>> Typed Racket might serve the "what invariants should I help
>>>> programmers that read my code be aware of?" role, but we'd have to
>>>> take out the optimizer, and the claims that if Typed Racket tells you
>>>> something, then you know it to be true (modulo the extensive caveats
>>>> about bugs in TR, Racket, GCC, Linux, Intel, etc).  I don't think
>>>> that's the right trade to make.
>>>
>>>
>>> (I don't really get what you're saying here at all, but I also think
>>> it isn't really an argument against my argument.)
>>>
>>> But I'll note that you forgot perl in your list. I'm sure it is used
>>> in the build process of one of those tools that we rely on.
>>>
>>> Everything is hopeless.
>>>
>>> Robby
>>>
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>>
>>
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-- 
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93