Probably Dance

Type systems tend to be too rigid. And dynamic typing just throws the baby out with the bathwater. So here are a few things I want:

1. I want to add information to an object at compile time without having to give it a new type. Is an integer in seconds or kilometers or kilometers per hour? Is a string SQL escaped or URL escaped or just plain text? Is a pointer known to not be zero? I also want to write logic based on this. If I multiply seconds with kilometers per hour, I want a result that makes sense. Most importantly, I want to do this easily: There is nothing stopping me from having a “url_escaped_string” type in C++, but then that string doesn’t work with any of my existing functions. I can add an implicit conversion operator, but then I lose my compile time information as soon as I use a function that accepts only one type of string. Or everything has to be templates and everything has to be duck-typing.

So what I envision is that every object has runtime properties and compile time properties. So a string might have a runtime property called size(), and it might have a compile time property called language() where I can set the language to be “SQL” or “URL” or similar and could then make sure at compile time that everything is escaped correctly. An int would not have any runtime properties, but it would still have compile time properties like its unit of measurement. We’ll start with that and then we’ll see what other features we’d want from that. (like functions being able to write conditions for their input parameters where they check the compile time properties of those objects and similar)

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