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josefs / Gradualizer

A Gradual type system for Erlang
MIT License
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Document the compat_seen function #528

Closed xxdavid closed 1 year ago

xxdavid commented 1 year ago

I think I finally understand why we need to carry the Seen variable. 😄

Oftentimes, I find the documentation of Gradualizer's codebase unsatisfactory and not very welcoming for newcomers (much useful information is just scattered in GitHub issues and pull requests). Is it okay to document things as I gradually (haha) become familiar with Gradualizer? Also, I'm better at concrete than abstract thinking, and examples help me a lot to understand things. Is it alright to include them in the docs?

zuiderkwast commented 1 year ago

Is it okay to document things as I gradually (haha) become familiar with Gradualizer?

Yes, I think it is very much okay to document things. :-)

The 'Seen' trick is used in similar ways in various places, IIRC not only in compat.

erszcz commented 1 year ago

I also think it's good to document things :+1:

On the other hand, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to document everything with this level of detail, since a typechecker is quite a dense piece of code with a lot of assumed background knowledge. The case of Seen is, for example, described in TaPL - see also the connected https://github.com/josefs/Gradualizer/pull/451#issuecomment-1246692967.