Where should the type information be 173

Herman Rubin bringing

Henry:

1. Rhetorical question. You have stated the equivalent of "I believe I could do it easily in what could be called a HLL buttembler" a large number of times over the past 10+ years. If it would be easy for you, why haven't you implemented it instead of spending all this time complaining why no one else has implemented it?

2. I would expect an HLL buttembler to be highly machine specific, while most language designers have a high priority on portability, for good reason. Your proposed solution has little appeal to most of the people you appear to be trying to persuade.

3. The characteristics of high performance architectures, e.g. out of order end, makes writing high performance buttembler more difficult and error prone. I strongly suspect that your HLL buttembler will require either implicit context saves etc that will hurt performance, or require the detailed order of end management that most people will find counterproductive.

4. There is a need for two levels of documentation, short but adequate to deal with 90%+ of the routines of interest (99%+ of the lines of code), and detailed and giving all the language defined prociedures including the edge cases: how is a zero length array, string, list etc. treated etc. I strongly suspect that most people would prefer dealing with the edge cases in the least error prone way, and you would prefer dealing with them in the most efficient way, but you consistently avoid giving details. No one know how to implement a DWIM language.