At 07:19 PM 9/28/2002 +0200, Eric van der Vlist wrote:
>On Sat, 2002-09-28 at 13:50, Jonathan Robie wrote:
> > To me, the most fundamental reason for datatypes is to allow them to be
> > part of the contract between producers and consumers of data.
>
>I wouldn't like to live in a dull world where there is to be an explicit
>contract between every producer and every consumer and where they don't
>exchange anything but data... :-)
I never implied that this was the case - and it has almost never been the
case in my professional career, except in the sense that all this stuff we
exchange, of various levels of structure, is data.
On the other hand, structured data *does* exist, and there are clear
implied contracts associated with it.
Jonathan
