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Aucbvax.5031 fa.editor-p utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!editor-people Mon Nov 9 10:29:05 1981 Re: Strong typing is bad for you. >From research!dbm@Berkeley Mon Nov 9 09:55:20 1981 There are strongly typed languages which allow one to define "polymorphic" functions like MAPCAR and MEMBER. The outstanding example is ML, the metalanguage (i.e. command and programming language) of the Edinburgh LCF system. ML has the pleasant property of being strongly typed without requiring the programmer to declare the types of variables -- the typechecking algorithm "deduces" the most general type for any expression or definition the user types in. For MAPCAR, this would be (* -> **) -> list * -> list **.

ML is described in a paper by Gordon, et. al. in the 1978 POPL Proceedings, and more fully in "Edinburgh LCF", by Gordon, Milner, and Wadsworth, LNCS Vol. 78. It is an interactive, incremental, "extensible" language like Lisp.

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