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From: | Jacques Carette |
Subject: | Re: [Aldor-l] [Axiom-developer] spad: language and compiler |
Date: | Wed, 30 Aug 2006 08:14:35 -0400 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 (Windows/20060719) |
Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
Compile time evaluation in full generality introduces a way make it really hard to find bugs.But anyway, maybe Aldor should allow compile time evaluation.
Quick remark -- it has been shown that: 1) C++'s template language is a Turing Complete PL2) Haskell's class types (with common extensions) is also a Turing Complete PL
3) All meta-programming systems allow arbitrary compile time evaluationYes, it does make debugging harder. But the advantages seem to _far_ outweigh the problems. One just develops new debugging (and coding) techniques to deal with the added power/complexity.
I could re-use Stephen's brilliant closing line from yesterday's email:"These kinds of errors have to be seen as bugs in programs, just as division by zero is a programming error and not an invalidation of integer arithmetic." -- S.M. Watt [where 'These kinds of errors' is now /Programs with infinite loops in types/]
Jacques
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