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Re: What is the purpose of static typing?

On Thursday, July 25, 2002, at 02:00 , email@hidden wrote:

Is there any purpose in static typing besides better compile time checking? In other words, would it not be better (for dynamism) to simply declare everything as `id'?

The dynamism stays unchanged, and static typing helps you to find typos and simple errors before you even started debugging.

That said, static types are indeed almost superfluous from the functionality point of view. The only situation when they can't be replaced by ids without any problems are -- slightly incorrect, but possible -- messages with same name, but different signatures, like

@interface Foo
-(int)blah;
@end
@interface Bar
-(double)blah;
@end

Now, [(Foo*)x blah] and [(Bar*)x blah] are compiled differently.
---
Ondra Cada
OCSoftware: email@hidden http://www.ocs.cz
private email@hidden http://www.ocs.cz/oc
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 >What is the purpose of static typing? (From: email@hidden)



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