Proposed change to libraries

[Dominic Williams]

Kostis Sagonas wrote:

> First let me enumerate the things we (all?) agree upon:
> 
>  1. Something needs to be done in libraries to make them more consistent
>     with their documentation and allow more effective type checking.

Erlang is not a type-safe language, so  it seems to me 
that the libraries are consistent with the 
documentation if they work as advertized, for 
advertized types. There is no implicit suggestion that 
they should refuse to work on other types.

I see guards as a pattern matching tool (i.e. to 
provide a separate clause for separate types), not as a 
type checking tool. I practice test-driven development, 
so I am not interested in the compiler doing any type 
checking. What matters to me, as a programmer, is that 
Erlang allows me to write simple, economical code where 
I don't need to explicitly declare types or guarantee 
type safety.

What the motivation is for having stricter type 
checking in Erlang?

Thanks,

Dominic Williams
http://www.dominicwilliams.net

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