[TUHS] python

[will.senn at gmail.com]

Nice. I've never appreciated type checking at 'compile' time, but I understand why others might (ocd). C was my first exposure to blending types, then Perl was fuzzier, then Python was even better at pretending types didn't matter. Now, with Lisp, I am freed from type concerns... until I'm not. Thankfully, it's my choice.

Will

On August 3, 2023 9:56:22 AM CDT, Dan Halbert <halbert at halwitz.org> wrote:
>Python has optional type annotations. There are batch tools (e.g., MyPy) to do type analysis and IDE's also provide help. Example:
>
>def greeting(name: str) -> str:
>    return 'Hello ' + name
>
>I found Python to be an enormous improvement over Perl for writing the kinds of things I used to write in Perl, with the Perl book at my side. I currently make my living working on Python for microcontrollers. Neverthless, I am fond of type checking too, and if I were writing a large Python system, I would use type annotations.
>
>I have used BCPL too, in the 70's, and we achieved some measure of type safety by careful naming.
>
>Dan H.
>
>On 8/3/23 10:19, Bakul Shah wrote:
>> I have not heard such horror stories about Common Lisp (or may be I have forgotten them!). My impression is that python doesn't quite have the kind of {meta,}programming tools Common Lisp has. CL has been used for large critical programs. Perhaps Von Rossum had more experience with statically typed languages than Lisp (because -- pure speculation here -- if he had used CL enough, he would never have designed python :-)
>> 
>>> On Aug 3, 2023, at 1:32 AM, Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I once inherited maintenance of a critical piece of infrastructure written in exquisitely well written, tested, and documented Python. I mean it, it was really really good.
>>> 
>>> It crashed about once a week and I had to fix it over and over because in those exponentially vast combinations of paths through the code would arise yet another way to turn a string into a list, or something analogous. It was hell.
>>> 
>>> Critical code needs static typing.
>>> 
>>> -rob
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 1:56 PM Bakul Shah <bakul at iitbombay.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>     python can certainly implement tail call optimization (TCO).
>>>     Pretty much any language can implement TCO but for some reason
>>>     people think such programs are harder to debug (and yet they
>>>     don't similarly complain about loops!). The beauty of Scheme was
>>>     that it *mandated* tail recursion.
>>> 
>>>     > On Aug 2, 2023, at 8:24 PM, George Michaelson
>>>     <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:
>>>     >
>>>     > Tail recursion not lazy eval.
>>>     >
>>>     > I wish words meant what I meant "inside" when I think them, not
>>>     > "outside" what they mean when I write them.
>>> 
>> 

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