On 14/08/2012 11:17 AM, clipka wrote:

> So, how many (mainstream) programming languages have you seen that
> actually /do/ work this way?
>
> C# is pretty "innovative" in that respect.

If doing things right rather than copying the old kludges that everybody 
else uses is "innovative", then sure...

>> My point being that everybody acts like "oh, of /course/ you can't
>> possibly do that", when in fact you can.
>
> You can't with the conceptual approach used by C#. You know, the "I can
> verify at compile time that the object referenced by variable X can do
> A, B, C and D."
>
> If you want to give such guarantees, you can't handle variables of types
> for which you have no declaration, because obviously you can't tell
> whether they can do A, B, C and D or not.

...and yet, in my Haskell snippet, a type is not exported, yet still you 
can convert it to a string, because that interface is implemented.

Obviously /the compiler/ must be able to see the declaration for the 
type. But that doesn't mean that /the programmer/ needs to.

> Andy, be fair. The fact that there's /someting/ programming language X
> can't do that Haskell can doesn't mean that programming language X is
> "poor quality".

No, that's true. I was really point pointing out that somebody says "X 
*must* work this way", and, er, no, it doesn't. It could work 
differently if you wanted it to. I guess it's a silly thing to argue 
about though.

My real concerns about C# are that they seem to have added a feature for 
everything, rather than step back and look for a simpler, more elegant 
design that solves everything, not just the things they added specific 
features for.

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