Errors and Type checking.

> From: jlg@cochiti.lanl.gov (J. Giles)
> ... The vast majority of debugging time is spent isolating and
> correcting problems which are not - and cannot be - found by the
> typechecks no matter how strict your type system is. To put it another
> way: people make mistakes and those mistakes which the compiler (or some
> analyzer) can find automatically are the least difficult to find and
> correct.


Not neccessarily. A lot of the mistakes that people make induce type
errors as a side effect. Of course the type checker won't give you the
cause of the error but in a fair number of cases it will detect that there
is an error even if the error is a logical one.


> It seems to me that the main problem with compiler writers ... is that
> compiler writers don't actually *use* the language the compiler is written
> to compile. Such compiler jockeys don't understand the issues which are
> important to the users.


A fair number of languages have compilers that are written in themselves.
(Eg. Prolog, C, Haskell ...)
--
Michael Winikoff
winikoff@cs.mu.oz.au
--

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