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- Path: gaia.ns.utk.edu!mbk
- From: mbk@caffeine.engr.utk.edu (Matt Kennel)
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
- Subject: Re: Will JAVA kill C++?
- Date: 20 Mar 1996 19:41:16 GMT
- Organization: University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- Message-ID: <4ipn0s$nkq@gaia.ns.utk.edu>
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-
- Mike Girou (girou@parashift.com) wrote:
- : Oliver Plohmann wrote:
- : > What I would like to figure out is whether the "method-level" strong
- : > typing
- : > in Java helps in reducing runtime errors compared to dynamic typing in
- : > Smalltalk.
- : >
-
- : Good question, sure to be controversial. Bill Berg, Marshall Cline
- : and I published a paper in October 1995's Communications of the ACM
- : describing the development of OS/400 in C++, and one of the strong
- : feelings by the developers was that strong type checking was a major
- : contributor to the project's success.
-
- : On the other hand, Tom Morgan and some of the people at Brooklyn
- : Union Gas kept records for quite some time on the cause of various
- : programming errors in their Smalltalk development. Surprisingly (?)
- : enough, problems due to run-time type checking were way down on the
- : list. There is anecdotal support for this finding from other ST shops
- : who have kept track of where their errors come from.
-
- Still these are not directly comparable.
-
- By measuring the frequency of run-time type errors in smalltalk it's
- not possible to know the number of errors that would be eliminated
- if using a different kind of language.
-
- The errors that a statically typed language with good generics mark
- as compile time type errors do not always end up as runtime Smalltalk
- type errors, but could manifest themselves in different ways.
-
- : Mike Girou girou@parashift.com
-