The Relationship Between Programming Languages and Type Systems
The Evolution of Type Systems
Why is a type system necessary at all? Some early programming languages did not provide a type system; they simply saw memory as a sequence of bytes. This perspective required developers to manually craft their own “types” to represent user-defined abstractions. For example, if a developer needed four bytes to represent integer values, then he or she had to write code to allocate four bytes for these integers and then manually check for overflow when adding two integers, byte by byte.
Later programming languages provided type systems, which included a number of built-in abstractions for common programming types. The first type systems were very low level, ...
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