The Industry choice

[Stefan Axelsson]

Paul Rubin wrote:

> I do believe that it's a horrible deficiency in Python that it has no
> declarations at all, even optional ones, like "perl -w" or "use
> strict".  Python's scoping hacks that result from the lack of
> declarations just seem to me like pure insanity.

Yes, ignoring most of the debate about static vs. dynamic typing, I've 
also longed for 'use strict'. Sure Python isn't as bad as (say) Awk in 
this respect; you have to at least assign a variable to make it spring 
into existence, but I've been bitten by typos there as well. Same when 
it comes to object methods (I can often never remember my method names).

Pychecker helps to some extent, but I wouldn't mind a compiler that only 
accepted identifiers that had been declared. I don't think that anyone 
could argue that typing 'use apa' before the first actual use (or words 
to that effect) would 'slow them down', or be very onerous.

Stefan,
-- 
Stefan Axelsson  (email at http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~sax)