Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

[prunesquallor at comcast.net]

Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au> writes:

> But the difference between dynamically typed languages and
> statically typed languages is that in dynamically typed languages, *every*
> data access (other than just copying data around) involves a dynamic dispatch.
> Sure, implementations can optimize a lot of them away.  But generally you're
> still left lots that your implementation can't optimize away, but which
> would not be present in a statically typed language, such as the O(N)
> dynamic type checks in the example above.

That's what the type-checking hardware is for.