Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

[Marshall Spight]

<prunesquallor at comcast.net> wrote in message news:wuaufe52.fsf at comcast.net...
> "Marshall Spight" <mspight at dnai.com> writes:
>
> > It would be really interesting to see a small but useful example
> > of a program that will not pass a statically typed language.
> > It seems to me that how easy it is to generate such programs
> > will be an interesting metric.
>
> Would this count?
>
> (defun noisy-apply (f arglist)
>   (format t "I am now about to apply ~s to ~s" f arglist)
>   (apply f arglist))

Interesting, interesting. Thanks for taking me seriously!

I'm trying to map this program into Java, and it's possible
but there are enough different ways to go about it that
I'm having a hard time reasoning about the result.

For one thing, what would f be? Probably an instance of
a class that implements a specific interface. But then,
implementing a specific interface is like saying we
know what type f is. Is it a function that takes a
single argument of type Object? If we concede
all those points, then this is fairly easy to map
into Java. If we say that f can take any single argument
then we can do it with reflection if we are willing
to add 15 lines of code, which is certainly not pretty.
If it can take any number of arguments then it's
looking triply awful now.

It's starting to feel like this is merely a demonstration
of Java's weakness in generic programming, and
not something hooked into Goedel.

Anyone have any comments?


Marshall