Adding static typing to Python

[Milliken, Peter]

You have drawn a false assumption there Brian, you assume that 95% of my
bugs are due to misnamed variables - I wished! :-) That wasn't what I was
trying to imply or state with that statement.

Strong typing requires that you design before you code (Extreme Programmers
beware! :-)) - therefore by the time a clean compile is achieved 95% of the
bugs *are* out :-) That is one of the primary advantages to strong typing,
it *forces* you to do the design up front otherwise you will never get a
clean compile.

You should try it one day :-)

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Quinlan [mailto:brian at sweetapp.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 12:04 PM
To: 'Peter Milliken'; python-list at python.org
Subject: RE: Adding static typing to Python


Peter Milliken wrote:
> When I compile a Ada program cleanly I know that 95% of the bugs are
out
> of it - before I even start testing! :-) Of course, it takes me longer

> to write up front but overall development effort (in my subjective
opinion > - since I have no metrics :-)) is that it is much lower.

If 95% of your bugs are of such a trivial nature, then you are either
very sloppy in your code production, you are an absolutely brilliant
designer or you are working on simple problems.

I would say that 99% of my bugs are due to design mistakes (e.g.
inappropriate algorithm selection, poorly designed interface) or
semantically incorrect algorithms (e.g. boundary errors, incorrectly
identified complexity/memory usage).

And finding these errors is substantially more difficult than finding
misnamed variables.

Cheers,
Brian