Monday, June 23, 2008

This type system is a joke

In the rigid composition style of academic papers, there are little tiny cracks where one can insert bits of humor and editorial opinion, as exemplified by the following sentence from a paper on Java's type system.

Unlike the GJ compiler, which rejects an expression containing stupid casts as ill-typed, FGJ indicate the special nature of stupid casts by including the hypothesis "stupid warning" into typing rules for stupid casts. See [10] for detailed discussions on the rules for typecasts.

-- Atsushi Agarashi, Benjamin C. Pierce, Philip Wadler, in "A Recipe for Raw Types" (which, as it happens, also defines "cooked" types.)

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