[Grace-core] Minutes of Teleconference 2013-07-24

[James Noble]

> 1.  I ran into Gilad Bracha's paper on optional types in Dart at
> 	http://www.dartlang.org/articles/optional-types/
> They are using the same defaults that we have just agreed to.  If a type parameter is omitted, say for List<T>, then it is treated as though there were an explicit type parameter of type Dynamic.

Dart has generic _classes_, and retains those parameters, but not generic _functions_.

This is why they can get by without type inference ---
the static checker will know that   the "get" of a List<Sting> is a String.
But to do this, they rely on the fact that constructor "calls" aren't function calls.

there is some more discussion here: 

https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/m/#!topic/misc/uHPi5fM9sLQ

Grace doesn't really have C++-like constructors - our requests to classes are just requests. 
It's not obvious to me we can adopt this approach to every kind of request - 
although we could try it & see how it goes, I guess :-)

James