[mercury-users] Why is --infer-all not the deafult?

[Maurizio Colucci]

On Wednesday 14 July 2004 17:16, Peter Schachte wrote:
> One factor that may lead to this difference of opinion is the
> abstraction level of the types you are using (or contemplating).  If I
> declare an argument to be a list of ints, for example, that gives very
> little insight into what information they carry.  If it's declared to
> be a set (represented as a sorted list) of timestamps, that gives much
> more information.

Yes, but what kind of information?

Knowing the type of a variable V only tells you what _can_ be done with V. It 
tells you nothing about what is actually done with V --- that is, the meaning 
of V.

For example, knowing that L is a list of timestamps tells me nothing about the 
meaning of L, that is "the last 10 of times when the user pressed a button".

That's why I think that type checking helps _writing_ code, not reading code.

Maurizio

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