Python vs .Net
Harry George
hgg9140 at seanet.com
Sun Jan 5 20:37:36 EST 2003
Laura Creighton <lac at strakt.com> writes:
> > "Karsten W. Rohrbach" wrote:
> > >
> > > Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, weak-typed, [...] programming
> >
> > As Paul said, you misspelled "strong", but also forgot "and dynamically typed
> > ".
> >
> > (See frequent and by now almost tedious past discussions in this group
> > as to why Python is most definitely not a "weakly typed" language.)
> >
> > -Peter
> > --
> > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
> If people around here would remember that the reason we have such
> discussions all too often is not that some people are _wrong_,
> and believe that Python is what you call a _weakly typed language_,
> but rather in their linguistic community 'strongly typed' ==
> 'statically typed' and 'weakly typed' == 'dynamically typed' things
> would be a lot more pleasant. The confusion is inevitable, because
> there are one heck of a lot of computer science text books out there
> which teach precisely this.
I'm not aware of these texts. The technical (as in graduate computer
science) language and language design texts I've seen understand and
describe strong/weak, static/dynamic quite well. It is the popular
press which mixes them up. But I do agree it is worth pointing to a
FAQ whenever the issue arises.
> And, no, it doesn't mean that people
> like Karsten W. Rohrbach don't understand the difference between
> what Python does, and what Perl does -- but when they want to
> discuss this difference, they speak of whether the language does
> or does not support 'automatic promotion of types' -- which is
> completely independent of whether you have to declare them or not,
> and whether you can rebind them on the fly.
>
My impression is that it is the silent rebinding which throws people
off, and gives the impression of weak typing. Typos give this
effect. In Prolog that is a std bug generator, and I've seen in in my
python code as well.
> Laura Creighton
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