I come not to bury C++, but to praise it...

[Donn Cave]

In article <100b266i0r70g86 at corp.supernews.com>,
 claird at lairds.com (Cameron Laird) wrote:
...
> Great!  *What* more?  When I look at Python and C++, I see the
> former as having *stricter*, if more dynamic, typing, so I don't
> understand what advantage C++ has in this one regard apart from
> time-of-detection.
> 
> I apologize, by the way, for writing "compile-type" where I 
> intended "compile-time".

Oops, so that was only an accident!  Well, I mean that
the semantics of types are different between C++ and
Python.

When we say Python has "dynamic typing", and C++ has
"static typing", I guess that's the generally accepted
way to describe what they do, but it makes it sound
like they're doing the same thing, only on a different
schedule.  Of course they are not at all doing the same
thing.  It might be more accurate to use a table, like

                 static      dynamic
   C++             yes         no
   Python          no          yes
   Objective C     yes         yes


Python may have stricter dynamic typing than C++ has
static typing, but that's hard to quantify.  On the
other hand, Python has no static typing at all.  There
is no way to tell it ``this function must be applied
to a string and must return an int.''  If applied to
a list instead, there's a non-trivial chance it will
manage to do something absurd with it.  If it returns
None under certain circumstances, there's a non-trivial
chance that value will be stashed away somewhere and
you'll later wonder where the heck that None came from.

Whether that's an advantage for C++ depends on 1) how
important you think that is, and 2) how well you think
C++ does it.  Between those two, I think I'd have to
agree it isn't much of an advantage, but then I'm just
a hacker.  Of course C++ is an easy target, but then
that's the nominal subject here.

   Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu