"no variable or argument declarations are necessary."

[Diez B. Roggisch]

> It is not about falling back on generic declarartion, it is about
> how such object will be treated. Diez seems to think that
> strongly-typed language can only deal with generic declarations
> by using something that allows circumventing the type system.

No, I don't - now it's you who makes assumptions about what I think. ML
and other FPs show that genericity can be done without circumvening.
Templates and generics in C++ partially do so.
>
> > In other words, you want Python to be strongly-typed, but sometimes you
> > want to allow a reference to be to any object whatsoever. In which case
> > you can't possibly do any sensible type-checking on it, so this new
> > Python+ or whatever you want to call it will suffer from the same
> > shortcomings that C++ and java do, which is to say type checking can't
> > possibly do anything useful when the acceptable type of a reference is
> > specified as ANY.
>
> And you are wrong. The problem with the C void* construct (I'm not that
> familiar with java) is that all type information is lost. When you
> use such a parameter in a function you have no idea what you are
> working with.

You don't know JAVA - I do. And nobody said that it lost that
type-information. It doesn't. Still, errors occur - namely
ClassCastEcxeptions.

That indicates that going back and forth via ANY doesn't necessarily
lose any type information, but the capability of today's type-systems
to keep that information across such a transition. This won't work:

Object foo = A();
B bar = (B) foo;

And please, pretty please don't argue with the simplicity of that
example - think of a bazillion statements between these two, possibly
done with run-time-instantiated classes that weren't known at
compile-time.

> But that doesn't need to be if you have a typesystem with an ANY type.
> Such a type declaration would mean that object of any type could be
> used here. However that doesn't imply that the type information
> of the actual objects used, has to be lost. That type information
> may still be available and usefull for further type checking.

JAVA has that.

> That you and Diez can only think about C, C++ or java constructs
> when I mention an ANY type, is your limitation. It doesn't
> need to be the limitation of a specific type system.

Again: where are the specifics of this system? In your head? Tell us
the gory detail, please.

Diez