[plt-scheme] The problem with Scala (OT, sorry)

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 4:50 PM, John Clements <clements at brinckerhoff.org> wrote:
>>
>> it is my rough anecdotal hear-say understanding that this happens in
>> other languages that have type inference. iiuc, the wisdom for
>> programming in ocaml is to actually put in type annotations anyway so
>> that errors show up closer to the real human error, rather than miles
>> away due to a type checker that manged to keep on trucking.
>
>
> No, I believe you're mistaken. It's possible (probable?) that type systems for (e.g.) Haskell
> and OCaml have funny corner cases, and they can certainly also produce bad error
> messages, but to the best of my knowledge they don't ever "guess" a type and then keep
> going. So, for instance, I believe it's the case at least for the core of the language that
> deleting all of the type annotations should not affect the semantics of the program.  Then
> again, Java's types are all tangled up with its semantics, so I suppose I shouldn't be
> surprised. In this case, though, it would have seemed a better choice to say "please give
> me a type for this empty list" than to guess at the List[Nothing] type.
>
> John

John... "guess a type and then keep going" is all that inference
algorithms ever do.  It's not a corner case for Haskell and OCaml,
it's the default.  Why else do you think the programs work, as you
say, with all the annotations removed?

--Carl