Automatic typing

[ponce]

On Friday, 28 June 2013 at 00:34:54 UTC, JS wrote:
> Would it be possible for a language(specifically d) to have the 
> ability to automatically type a variable by looking at its use 
> cases without adding too much complexity?

Well ocaml has it 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner) and well 
it's not all that positive, at least in that language.

Combined with parametric polymorphism it's nice and sound, except 
it has the potential to hide a simple typo a lot further from 
where it is (think mixing up integer operators and FP operators).
As it break overloading on "leaves", it is the reason ocaml has 
"print_string" and "print_int" which is quite frankly ugly.

Once you have type inference, the first thing you do to make your 
code readable is to add back type annotations.