[PRL] Benjamin Pierce: Types Considered Harmful

[Richard Cobbe]

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 02:39:43PM -0400, William D Clinger wrote:
> Dave Herman wrote:
> > The weirdest part was when he claimed that one of the big issues people
> > have with type systems is performance. Does anyone actually say this?
>
> Yes, and this view was extremely influential for about
> 15 years.  See Brian Kernighan's essay on "Why Pascal
> is Not My Favorite Programming Language", online at
> http://pingu.ii.uj.edu.pl/~armo/homepage/amideveloper/dev/nopascal.pdf

That 404s.  When I googled for the article title, I found
<http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html>.

Perhaps this is not in fact the article that you're referring to, but I
didn't really see anything in there that addresses the claim that Dave
mentioned above.  The closest I could get was a discussion of how Pascal's
type system prevents the programmer from writing an application-specific
alternative to "new", but nothing that I saw specifically links this to
performance concerns.

On several occasions, Kernighan presents the lack of an "escape" from
Pascal's type system as a criticism of the language, but he does so largely
as an issue of expressibility (in an informal sense only, of course) rather
than of efficiency.

Which part of the article did you mean?

Richard