RE: Strong Typing, Dynamic Languages, What to do?

[Doug Orleans <dougo@ccs.neu.edu>]

Alex Peake writes:
 > Forgive my ignorance - I am just an application developer not a language
 > expert - but..
 > 
 > does not Common Lisp give much of the "typing option" that offers the
 > "graceful transition" you refer to? For example, there are multi-methods
 > where you can use:
 > (defmethod (do-it ((arg1 float) (arg2 float)) body...)
 > (and even define a version to capture all other types and throw an error)

Not to be too nit-picky, but multimethod specializers aren't the same
thing as type annotations, although perhaps CLOS treats them the
same-- I think Dylan does too?  I know that in Cecil and MultiJava,
you can have one or the other or both-- they are pretty much
orthogonal (although your specializers ought to be subtypes of your
type annotations).

--dougo@ccs.neu.edu