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John.Cowan wrote:
* Once one has optional type declarations, the need for type-specific arithmetic primitives is reduced or eliminated.How far down the call chain is the type inference to be done; in other words, do these declarations only affect calls that are statically within the lambda where they appear?
Since it *optional* static typing, I'm assuming that the specific operations are "consistent" in the sense of the following example: If (and (fixnum? x) (fixnum? y)) then: (eqv? (+ x y) (fx+ x y)) In that case the use of fx+ rather than + is basically compiler hint that the operands are expected (required) to be fixnums. Then: (fx+ x y) is equivalent to: (let ((x_f :: <fixnum>) (y_f :: <fixnum>)) (+ x_f y_f)) and the fx+ operation is unneeded: The same effect *and efficiency* can be achieved with suitable type declarations and/or type inference. Obviously one would have a cast operator as a shorthand. Kawa has: (as <TYPE> <expr>) which is equivalent to: (let ((tmp :: <TYPE> <expr>)) tmp) In Kawa <TYPE> is actually an identifier that evaluates to a Type value, and (as ...) is a function that is specially optimized by the compiler. However, I don't think R6RS should not go that far, but could just define (as <TYPE> <expr>) as a special form. To answer your actual (I think) question: Type declarations are local and apply lexically, just as in C, Java - and Common Lisp. Note we don't need (for this purpose, at least) a fancy type system with higher-order types. Just simple types corresponding to the various type predicates: E.g. corresponding to (procedure? x) we'd have a plain <procedure> type specifier. -- --Per Bothner per@xxxxxxxxxxx http://per.bothner.com/