News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Types as axioms, or: playing god with static types by valenterry on Saturday August 15, 2020 @11:54PM (#24174914)
You are right and it seems you have a very good gut-feeling about these things! :)

What you describe is commonly called a "(value) dependent type system". There are languages that support this, e.g. Idris which was specifically built for that: https://www.idris-lang.org/

Here is an example where the printf function is built purely in Idris: https://paulosuzart.github.io/blog/2017/06/18/dependent-type...

The compiler will parse the input string such as "some number %d and a string %s" at compile time (!) and assess whether the following arguments passed to printf satisfy the shape of the string.

There are no comments on this comment yet.