Elm Static Types — Tentamen Software Testing Blog

TL;DR

The static type describes the kind of data that could be associated with value. This post is part of the functional language series, and it is based on a remarkable book Programming Elm Build Safe and Maintainable Front-End Applications by Jeremy Fairbank.

The great source of errors in a program is when we associate with value data that do not match in type. Javascript allows this in the image above. We assigned to value number 3, string 3 and float 3.00. The assignment is not the issue here, but the problem arises when we start referencing in calculations when we expect value as a number, but user assigned string. It would be a nice feature that Javascript warns us about this in compile time.

Elm does this in compile-time because it uses static types.

We have in StaticTypes module add function, and we try to add integer and string. Here is compilation result error:

Remember

• difference between dynamic and static type languages
• compilation vs. runtime errors

Originally published at https://blog.tentamen.eu on July 7, 2020.