Comment by pron
2 days ago
You may be right in general, but soundness comes from formal logic, where they're pretty fastidious with their definitions. Soundness certainly doesn't mean the expressivity of the types (i.e. what constraints they can represent); it's about the relationship between the runtime behaviour of a program and the types in the code.
Again I think you're trying to push a specific definition as more correct than OP's somehow. Why not just ask them what they meant to understand their intent/context instead of saying they are wrong?
Unless the point of your argument isn't to understand OP but simply to "win."
I think I understand their point and even said, "What you're saying is that papers on types show how you can use types to express more constraints," and that's correct. I merely pointed out that that's not soundness, which is something I think they'd like to know. There may be some leeway in the definition of soundness and how it's similar to or different from type safety, but either way, type expressivity is something different altogether (and C certainly has issues with both expressivity and type safety or soundness, but they're different issues). So the point isn't to win - the argument was right and I'm not claiming that C's type system is expressive - but to explain the different terms and their meaning in programming languages and formal semantics.