Re: calling function but ignoring results

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Friday, July 9, 2021 at 12:14:10 PM UTC-6, G.B. wrote:
> They'll be good, for sure, when securing the workplace semantically; 
> also good for implementors of more complex type inference algorithms 
> and, consequently, for makers of the CPUs that are needed to properly 
> handle the omissions. I think the proper number of omissions is 
> a subject of research at ETH Zürich. They are trying to find 
> a sweet spot that makes inference finish in reasonable time.
I tend to dislike type-inference* almost altogether; I think Ada 2012 and before got it right: very constrained and deterministic contexts (eg the for loop's index).
Yes, I realize there's systems like Haskell that are good about types, but as you say these have inferences that take a while. While I'm all in favor of making the compiler do the tedious work, given that types are [in general] a static portion of the program as a whole it should be possible (to borrow from the GPS UI) to throw up the little wrench/auto-fix option and "fill in" the types found so that the next compile doesn't have to infer types... but I suspect that most implementations will instead simply do the inference again and again and again on each compile and waste your time.

* It invites the "could possibly work" C-ish mentality, rather than the "cannot possibly not-work" Ada-mentality, IMO.