declaration of variables?

[André Jonsson]

Jp Calderone wrote:
>   "enlightened" language?  Hrm.  Dynamic, sure... OO, okay... functional,
> sometimes!  But "enlightened"?

:-)  I mostly meant that Python seems more "aware" than most other languages of 
usability and readability. Do those not count?

>   Chances are, if you have this kind of error in your program, there will be
> an error, a NameError later on when you try to use "value" and it isn't
> bound.  Compile time is almost always essentially the same as runtime, so
> you get the information at about the same time.  Even better, if you have
> unit tests that cover this code path, you find out before you even run your
> actual program.
> 
>   Could the problem be avoided with variable declarations?  Yep.  Would I
> trade the flexibility of the current system for a small improvement in
> compile-time checking of my code?  Nah, I don't think so.

Flexibility? Please explain. To me this just seem error-prone, and a pain in the b*tt.

Also, it may not even be possible to detect by a unit-test, because there may not be 
a syntactical error or such that would cause a run-time error, it just "behaves" 
strangely (see my example of a _very_ simple case). In a larger program/project this 
could get kinda complex. But I guess that kind of stuff aren't supposed to be done in 
Python then...

But it appears that pychecker reports this kind of stuff so I'll quit complaining 
now...  :-)

/André