> Type checking bugs are most definitely not the most common ones
This is not a facetious question, so bear with me: what is a "type checking bug"?
Do you mean "a bug in language L that would have been caught by the typechecker T, if only L had it"?
That's the only meaning I can think of that makes sense [1] (ok, thought of another one [2]). But what does it mean that "most bugs" aren't of that kind? Is it that "most bugs are of a kind that cannot be caught by any conceivable typechecker"?
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[1] We can safely disregard the other possible interpretation of "a type checking bug is a bug in the typechecker itself" ;)
[2] Maybe "this expected a list but I passed it an integer instead"? I do occasionally trip over those with Python, but I think most typecheckers are more advanced than that, and can check for more interesting classes of bugs.
This is not a facetious question, so bear with me: what is a "type checking bug"?
Do you mean "a bug in language L that would have been caught by the typechecker T, if only L had it"?
That's the only meaning I can think of that makes sense [1] (ok, thought of another one [2]). But what does it mean that "most bugs" aren't of that kind? Is it that "most bugs are of a kind that cannot be caught by any conceivable typechecker"?
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[1] We can safely disregard the other possible interpretation of "a type checking bug is a bug in the typechecker itself" ;)
[2] Maybe "this expected a list but I passed it an integer instead"? I do occasionally trip over those with Python, but I think most typecheckers are more advanced than that, and can check for more interesting classes of bugs.