[plt-scheme] More fun with typed scheme: attempt to write vector-join and a minor rant

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 6:17 AM, Scott McLoughlin <scott at adrenaline.com> wrote:
> Anyway, I LOVE the idea of typed scheme, and could even imagine loving
> WORKING with it, but given
> that nearly every time I've touched it I've had to post to this list and
> retrieved a response akin
> to, "Oh yeah, sorry, that's not really 100% yet," maybe it would be kinder
> to those whose
> time is actually worth something to actually pull the plug on the beloved
> feature until it gets
> the 1000's of test cases, ~50 pages of introductory tutorial and ~200+ pages
> of detailed
> documentation that the (otherwise nifty) language deserves.

Typed Scheme is still an "experimental" language -- if you use you
should expect to run into problems. Basically, you're a beta tester.
Furthermore, my experience is that Typed Scheme's support of vectors
is quite lacking compared to its support of, say, lists. I think your
use is exposing many flaws that you wouldn't run into if you weren't
dealing with vectors.

You can get useful work done in Typed Scheme. I use the library here:

  http://github.com/noelwelsh/numeric/tree/master/bonfire/

almost every day. You need to accept some pain (err... learning)
though. You'll see that bonfire is a mix of typed and untyped code --
necessary to work around current limitations in Typed Scheme's type
system.

N.