PEP0238 lament

[Grant Edwards]

In article <slrn.pl.9lqvmg.n1b.qrczak at qrnik.zagroda>, Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote:

>>>> Language design mistake.
>>>
>>>It allows to write code which increments a number of unknown type
>>>by one. How would you write it in your universe?
>
>> Literals can be used for any type where the representation matches,
>> so incrementing is not a problem.
>
>Ok, this applies to Ada and Haskell. But how to fix the "design
>mistake" in Python?
>
>IMHO it doesn't have a practical fix,

For some definitions of "practical".  My definition of
practical doesn't include changing the meaning of "/" between
minor revs of a language. ;)

To be honest, I would prefer than int/float or float/int throws
an exception (and should possibly do the same for "+", "-",
etc.).  If you want to mix them, then tell the compiler what to
do.  Explicit is better than implicit:

 y = x/float(i)
 j = int(x)/i

>as long as a literal is an expression with type independent
>from the context. This implies that implicit conversions from
>int to float and rational are unavoidable in Python.

Why?

>Without them some reasonable code is hard to write.

I guess I never ran into such a situation.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Was my SOY LOAF left
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