Re: Drifting towards a statically typed Emacs Lisp. [Was: Introducing 'safety' compilation parameter]

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > >   Emacs Lisp should not be turned into a statically typed language.

  > > without losing any useful content, ....

  > Not really - what would have been lost is the equivalent  of ".... and I
  > see this process happening at the moment.".  The frog metaphor was an
  > economical way of phrasing this.  Again, I'm sorry it caused offence.

I worry about this too.

This is not the first time that Lisp compilation has inspired adding
features to declare types of various values that apear inside Lisp
functions.  For instance, that happened with Maclisp in the 1970s.

That pressure is not necessarily overwhelming; it does not necessarily
pressure programmers to declare types in all their code.  When I wrote
Lisp code in the 1970s, I did not declare types.  I was not required
to do so.

But what worries e is that users who want the highest speed
will put pressure on all Emacs developers to add type declaratons
everywhere to give those users the highest possible speed.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)