encapsulation, typing & other questions

[brueckd at tbye.com]

On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Ragu Bharadwaj wrote:

> brueckd at tbye.com wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Ragu Bharadwaj wrote:
> >
> > I don't know of any plans to do this, and the benefits are probably less
> > than you'd imagine. This issue tends to come up as a theoretical problem
> > much more often (if ever) than it does in practice.
>
> Beg to disagree completely. I've seen too many folks encounter problems
> to believe this.

Beg to disagree completely. In your original post you said you were new to
Python, right? Well, in Python this problem does not happen much at all in
practice. And if it does happen, you will probably find out about it in
less time that it would have taken you to write out some type declaration.

Search comp.lang.python on Google groups - you'll find plenty of messages
about how type info in function decls might theoretically help and few or
no messages from people reporting actual errors that would have been
caught.

Flawed explicit type systems actually add complexity and bugs.

-Dave