Phoenix.pm: typesafety.pm - meeting topic?

intertwingled intertwingled at qwest.net
Mon Aug 4 04:46:55 CDT 2003


Heh, at first glance at the name "typesafety" I thought it was something to
keep me from getting my fingers stuck in the keyboard =)

Tony

Scott Walters wrote:

>Hi folks,
>
>I've just unleashed typesafety.pm on CPAN. Okey, I did it a week ago. Or so.
>
>What does it do?
>
>It lets you declare the type of object that a scalar will hold, and the
>return values of methods, and the arguments accepted by methods, and
>performs an inspection (or static analisys) of your program to make sure
>that types are used consistently. There are a whole lot fo reasons you'd
>want to do this, and "real" OO languages (like Java, C++, Simula, Smalltalk)
>always do. Even some non-OO languages (ML, eg OcaML) do.
>
>In a nutshell, OO types are like sets, and each method accepts things
>of a type that belong to a certain set (Animals, Pets, Cats, Siamese Cats, ...).
>Things belong to sets that belong to other sets, and things may also belong
>to multiple completely different sets. By formalizing what types are 
>accepted, returned, and stored, not only are stupid mistakes found at 
>"compile time", but you are forced to think about methods in terms of
>what situations they will be required to deal with. Sometimes a method is
>too specific - it should be working on Pets instead of Cats. Sometimes
>a method is not specific enough - a bathe() method shouldn't accept
>just any Pet, or it might get a Parakeet or a Cat. It should only accept
>Dogs, or it should only accept things that are of type Washable, which
>might include many things that are Pets and things that are of type
>Dishwear and Clothing. Oh, and using strict types also means you don't
>have to explicitly check the types of incoming objects to make sure
>that they are what you expect. Code tends to "grow" a lot of checks
>as it is debugged, and it clutters things up and slows things down.
>
>I wrote up a Wiki pages on the subject:
>
>http://perldesignpatterns.com/?TypeSafety
>
>Mark Jason Dominus also did an excellent presentation on the topic:
>http://perl.plover.com/yak/typing/
>
>Of course, that predates typesafety.pm. 
>
>If there is interest, I'll do a proper presentation on this subject:
>
>1. Why use strict types
>2. Strict types in Java - declarations
>3. Strict types in Perl - declarations, error messages, what is checked
>4. Static code analysis using the B:: backend and other insanity =)
>
>-scott
>
>
>
>  
>





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