6.5 Type Inference
Type inference refers to the ability to deduce automatically the type of a value in a programming language. It is a feature present in some strongly statically typed languages. It is often characteristic of, but not limited to, functional programming languages in general. Some languages that include type inference are Visual Basic (starting with version 9.0), C# (starting with version 3.0), Clean, Haskell, ML, OCaml, Scala. This feature is also planned for C++0x and Perl 6. The ability to infer types automatically makes many programming tasks easier, leaving the programmer free to omit type annotations while still permitting type checking.
Let us take an example.
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