String-Plus

What does this variable represent?

my $thingie =<<'END';
Thaddeus Droit
4616 NW Washington Place
Beaverton, OR 97006
END

It's obviously an address, but what does Perl know about it? Perl knows it's a string. Perl knows it's some 60 characters long. Perl may even know that it's a valid string of Latin-1 characters.

Perl doesn't know where the string came from, nor that it contains a street address or a legal name nor a zip code (and not a zip + 4). Any meaning to the program beyond "It's a string of some 60 characters and is valid in the Latin-1 encoding" is far beyond what Perl knows about it. That's why the name of the variable is $thingie; even though Perl doesn't care about variable names, calling it $address instead could have led you to believe there's more structural meaning to this chunk of memory than actually exists.

Names are important, at least to people maintaining source code. This code is obviously wrong:

$user->set_address( $birthday );

... but to Perl it might as well be:

$foo->bar( $baz );

... for all of the semantic meaning it understands. There's no obvious intent.

I know you're smart and you're way ahead of me and you think "If I wanted a good static type system, I know where to find Haskell or OCaml and I'd never let code that bad get out of code review and why aren't you writing tests." but that's not the point. You can be super careful or make APIs which restrict the most natural way to write code in the host language in favor of extra security. That may be the right approach. (You have to be careful, though: the ease of interpolating untrusted user input into a raw string or the use of register globals in PHP seems analogous to the attractive nuisance doctrine, where people who don't know any better can't analyze the risk appropriately.

There may be another way.

Suppose I annotated the address:

my Address $thingie =<<'END';
Thaddeus Droit
4616 NW Washington Place
Beaverton, OR 97006
END

It's still a chunk of memory with certain characteristics, but now it has an extra piece of metadata related to the program itself (and not merely Perl itself). A clever compiler could detect certain places where the semantics of an operation don't match:

method set_address(Address $addy) { ... }

... though you do have to be able to resolve this kind of dispatch at compilation time to prove the type safety of the entire program at compilation time. (I've seen suggestions that even Smalltalk programs can resolve some 85-90% of dispatch targets in a static fashion.)

You don't have to go that far; runtime verification with a good test suite is effectve, can be fairly cheap, and is available right now in Perl 5 with Moose.

There's still another way. Consider again the untrusted input example. If you enable tainting, you might read user input into an address:

my Address $untrusted_addy = $req->get( 'address' );

You don't see it in the declaration, but the "This is tainted!" metadata is present in $untrusted_addy. How do you deal with that?

You could be picky about always untainting untrusted data, but can you do that accurately and effectively? Can you rely on everyone always getting it right?

What if you could write:

SQL {{
    UPDATE users SET address = { Address $address } WHERE user = { User $user }
}}

... and Perl could verify that $address is an appropriate Address (and $user is an appropriate User), could quote and escape and validate both of them effectively, could extract the primary key from $user, and could untaint any tainted $address or $user?

If your language supports multiple dispatch, lets you define your own types, lets you override stringification, and can override interpolation for cases like these, you can do such things.

In other words, you could turn what would otherwise be a raw string into an embedded little language with its own syntax and semantics, interoperate with native data structures in the host language, and provide composable safety—and users don't have to know much of anything about how this works, as it pretty much does what they expect.

I can imagine a language like that.