Re: shiny uno version, Desktop IDL

On 06/14/2012 01:58 PM, Bjoern Michaelsen wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 01:44:58PM +0200, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
> > But then, when you assume the entity's behavior is (largely) static anyway,
> > why not properly codify it in the first place?
>
> Because is lots and lots of bookkeeping and boilerplate for little gain.

Actually writing down the static information can have a huge benefit on 
maintainability.  (Even in static languages with type inference like 
Haskell, where you would not actually need to write down type 
signatures, it is common practice to nevertheless do so especially for 
exported entities, for better documentation.)  Witness gbuild: we do run 
into cases there where a macro is called with more arguments than it 
expects, and at least I often need to decipher definitions (or worse, 
use "monkey see, monkey do" copy/paste) to figure out what arguments, 
and in what order, a macro takes.  I would *love* to have a more 
statically typed machinery there...

Stephan