newsham:
I guess I didn't express my point very clearly... That C programmers apparently don't realise that a type system that's sound will give them something -- i.e. their programmer won't ever segfault. I wonder when we try to advertise Haskell if we should be saying "we can give you programs that never segfault", instead of "we have a strong type system".
That would be overpromissing. You can definitely get segfaults in Haskell. The obvious example being
but many less contrived and more unexpected examples arise naturally (unfortunately).
By the way, the Java camp has (correctly) been touting this argument for quite a while.
And it is just a property of strong typing, not static typing. The Pythonists would happily make the same remark. We promise both safety and efficiency. -- Don