[plt-scheme] Newbie: Restricting types

Somewhat related to these questions is the idea of software contracts,
first talked about by Parnas in 1972, and later talked about lots and
lots by Meyer. This plays into Scheme some too and I've written about
it a little (http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/~robby/pubs).

Robby

At Sat, 20 Mar 2004 02:28:57 +0000, C Rose wrote:
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> 
> Hi all
> 
> I'm new to Scheme and am working through the "How to Design Programs" 
> book. I'm learning Scheme for interest only at this stage and I'm 
> trying to reconcile some of the differences between Scheme and other 
> languages I'm familiar with (mostly imperative languages with C-style 
> syntaxes).
> 
> I'm intrigued by the dynamic typing in Lisp and Scheme (particularly in 
> the face of comments like "C/C++/Java/Perl/etc. are for people who want 
> to make things that work. Common Lisp is for peple who want to make 
> things that don't break" by Lisp/Scheme advocates). Coming from such a 
> background, I'm a little bemused at how dynamic typing can facilitate 
> more robust programs.
> 
> I understand that one can gain flexibility by defining functions that 
> take arguments of arbitrary type. I've looked at structures in Scheme, 
> and I can see that one can write a function that is essentially 
> polymorphic by explicitly testing the type(s) of the arguments, for 
> example (from HtDP):
> 
> (define (perimeter a-shape)
>    (cond
>      [(circle? a-shape)
>       (* (* 2 (circle-radius a-shape)) pi)]
>      [(square? a-shape)
>       (* (square-length a-shape) 4)]))
> 
> Imagine that I have a structure defined as follows:
> 
> (define-struct three-vector (x y z))
> 
> I can create a three-vector of numbers by doing (make-three-vector 1 2 
> 3). I can also create a three-vector of symbols by doing 
> (make-three-vector 'a 'b 'c). However, is it possible to write the 
> definition of three-vector so that one cannot create a three-vector 
> with non-number entries? If this is not the correct thing to want to 
> do, then why?
> 
> More generally, can someone explain how the dynamically-typed approach 
> can yield more robust programs than the statically-typed approach 
> (without assuming the programmer is always going to be wise enough to 
> place guards on the types that their functions will accept -- this 
> seems to not only be wildly optimistic, but a kind of "static typing in 
> reverse")?
> 
> I'm not trying to start any holy wars here :-)
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Chris