Explicit Type Annotations

In languages with good type inference, it's often quick and easy to omit type annotations. As a student prone to typos, I've found that this can lead to pernicious bugs when the function parameters are not obvious.

In this example ported to F# from Richard Bird's book, glue is supposed to take a digit and a tuple of (Expression, Values) and return a list of (Expression, Values) tuples. But there is a syntactic bug that cannot be inferred without more context (n.b. the list delimiter in F# is a semi-colon rather than comma):

type Digit = int
type Factor = Digit list
type Term = Factor list
type Expression = Term list
type Values = (Digit * Digit * Digit * Digit)

let glue x ((xs :: xss) :: xsss, (k, f, t, e)) =
        [(((x :: xs) :: xss) :: xsss, (10 * k, k * x + f, t, e)),
         (([x] :: xs :: xss) :: xsss, (10, x, f * t, e)),
         ([[x]] :: (xs :: xss) :: xsss, (10, x, 1, f * t + e))]

In an IDE, the type checker makes the error obvious once annotations are added. Editing for the correct list delimiters, glue is defined as:

let glue' (x: Digit) (ev: Expression * Values) : (Expression * Values) list =
    match x, ev with
    | x, ((xs :: xss) :: xsss, (k, f, t, e)) ->
        [(((x :: xs) :: xss) :: xsss, (10 * k, k * x + f, t, e));
         (([x] :: xs :: xss) :: xsss, (10, x, f * t, e));
         ([[x]] :: (xs :: xss) :: xsss, (10, x, 1, f * t + e))]


Just another reminder that "explicit is better than implicit".