Re: Why put type information into syntax?

I think this thread has largely misunderstood the original question.


The question was not "why are builtin types needed?" It was why
should the syntax treat the _names_ of builtin types as reserved words
instead of ordinary identifiers. In many languages,
programmer-defined and builtin type names appear in exactly the same
contexts. So making the builtin type names be predefined identifiers,
instead of reserved words, yields the same language and makes the
syntax more robust.


Of course C syntax can't be fixed to work this way. The fact that the
mere presence/absence of a declaration (most pertinently, because an
include file is not found) can change whether subsequent C code is
syntactially correct or not speaks for itself about this design.


Srineet wrote:
> I think there is another reason for built in types. Some language
> features rely on them, for example, in C the expression in an
> if-statement / while-statement etc. must be coercable to int. Now, if
> there was no built-in int type, what rule can you have for that? This
> is even more relevant for languages with a builtin boolean type, where
> the if-condition-expression must be boolean. So we see that some
> builtin types not only make the gammar "easy to specify" but are in
> fact necessary.

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