Interpreted and compiled languages

Posted Nov 18, 2009 8:47 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
In reply to: Language wars by keithp
Parent article: The notmuch mail client

> My other complaint about Ruby/python/perl/misc is fairly simple -- I expect the computer to detect and complain about my programming errors as soon as possible. Static typing errors can be detected during compilation and need not wait until execution time.

This is probably a really silly thought, but more often than not, Python code is compiled (into pycode, but still compiled). Sometimes on the fly, usually in advance for distributed packages. I can picture Python scripts containing additional type information for variables, perhaps as specially formatted comments or docstrings, and the compiler printing warnings at compile time, lint-style, when something looked fishy - perhaps not for on-the-fly compiles, but only for advance compiles, or then again perhaps for all.

I don't know if Python has any other special issues (apart from the white space thing and the global namespace).

Interpreted and compiled languages

Posted Nov 22, 2009 23:56 UTC (Sun) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]

Python is a really poor example. It's slow and uses loads of memory.

Look at a real, static, compiled language with type inference. The current leaders in this area are all
functional languages. FWIW I started writing something similar to notmuch/sup in OCaml (a few
months ago, and without knowing about sup -- I'll probably abandon it for something better
supported now like notmuch).

Rich.