Hello Jacques, Wednesday, May 31, 2006, 8:07:29 PM, you wrote:
I am completely biased in this regard: I have spent several years maintaining ~800Kloc of legacy dynamically typed [commercial] code. A lot of this code has a life-span of roughly 20 years [ie once written, it takes an average of 20 years before it gets re-written]. That experience has converted me to a static-type fan, as well as a fan of designs that are for the "long term"; short-term convenience is something that is great for short-lived code (< 5 years is short-lived to me ;-) ).
my own programming experience say the same - strict typing significantly simplify program writing by ensuring it's correctness. and Haskell catch many problems as early as i compile code. but in this case we will add more complexity for standard use of functions (when just Ptr required) without any improvements in reliability just to catch potential problems with unusual usage. moreover, there are also encode/encodeLE/... functions that produce String - they also don't need any special String types why i include encoding type in function name? just to simplify usage, all the 'encodePtr*' functions can be expressed via one encodePtrWith, but i don't think that many peoples want to write this himself: encodePtr = encodePtrWith put_ encodePtrLE = encodePtrLEWith put_ encodePtrBitAligned = encodePtrBitAlignedWith put_ encodePtrBitAlignedLE = encodePtrBitAlignedLEWith put_ encodePtrLEWith write = encodePtrWith (\s a-> withByteAlignedLE s (`write` a)) encodePtrBitAlignedWith write = encodePtrWith (\s a-> withBitAligned s (`write` a)) encodePtrBitAlignedLEWith write = encodePtrWith (\s a-> withBitAlignedLE s (`write` a)) -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com