Hindley-Milner Type Inference (2012)

Re:Hindley-Milner Type Inference (2012) by ohazi on Friday July 10, 2020 @03:34PM (#23795425)

In Rust, I'll usually add a type hint for clarity if I have a massive method chain full of confusing transformations. Sometimes I'll also temporarily add them to closure arguments so that autocomplete is happier.

But otherwise you're right... they're almost never actually needed unless there's an actual ambiguity (e.g. what kind of collection should .collect() produce?)

It's pretty great. I can confidently do a whole pile of reckless-looking stuff and be reasonably confident that I've done what I intended to do once the compiler is happy.

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Re:Hindley-Milner Type Inference (2012) by AzzieElbab on Friday July 10, 2020 @04:07PM (#23795813)

I do this on scala. Given scalac is much slower than ocaml compiler and inference is not as stellar. Regardless, explicit type annotations make code so much easier to read. Anonymous lambdas being an important exception

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Re:Hindley-Milner Type Inference (2012) by nine_k on Friday July 10, 2020 @05:19PM (#23796609)

The real footgun in Scala, to my mind, is implicits.

They are inferred, and that's the point of their ergonomics, but when they are inferred incorrectly, it becomes pretty confusing and sometimes cryptic.

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Re:Hindley-Milner Type Inference (2012) by lmm on Friday July 10, 2020 @11:03PM (#23799106)

Not to make excuses for the poor errors in the default language, but the "splain" plugin can help a lot, as can ctrl-shift-P in IntelliJ.

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