More Typing Problems

[Neal Gafter]

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 5:12 AM, Maurizio Cimadamore <
maurizio.cimadamore at oracle.com> wrote:

>  I'm referring to the classic notion structural subtyping [1] (very common
> in theoretical tractations); a structural type-system would give you the
> ability to denote "the type of an object that has some method called
> getName", as in the original email - in Java, you can't do that - sure you
> can mimick structural subtyping with generics by using a type-variable bound
> of some type A where A has a member named 'getName' - but that's not
> structural subtyping.
>
> [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_type_system
>

You should talk to Brian Goetz, who appears to have a completely different
definition of structural typing when he uses the term in the context of
justifying the removal of function types from the lambda draft.

Cheers,
Neal