Type system

[Curtis Stanford]

I don't quite understand the description of the type system in the FAQ. I notice that in functions, the parameters have no types. Can you just pass anything in there? Is there any way to specify a contract with the caller that certain types are required?

Thanks

[Dave Newton]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Curtis Stanford <cur...@stanfordcomputing.com> wrote:

I don't quite understand the description of the type system in the FAQ. I notice that in functions, the parameters have no types. Can you just pass anything in there? Is there any way to specify a contract with the caller that certain types are required?

Guards [1] or pattern matching [2] would seem the natural choices.

Dave

[1] http://looplang.org/doc/#guards

[2] http://looplang.org/doc/#patternmatching
 

[Curtis Stanford]

On Tuesday, June 12, 2012 10:19:13 AM UTC-6, Dave wrote:

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Curtis Stanford wrote:

I don't quite understand the description of the type system in the FAQ. I notice that in functions, the parameters have no types. Can you just pass anything in there? Is there any way to specify a contract with the caller that certain types are required?

Guards [1] or pattern matching [2] would seem the natural choices.

I guess I'm a bit of a static typing snob, but it doesn't seem practical to pattern match all arguments to functions to check types. I guess it answers my question though in that types on function parameters are not enforced in any way by the type system. 

[Dhanji R. Prasanna]

You can just use a wildcard matcher to raise an error, which is the same thing.