Python less error-prone than Java

[Christoph Zwerschke]

Kaz Kylheku wrote:
 > You can have statically typed languages with inadequate type safety,
 > and you can have dynamically typed languages with inadequate type
 > safety.

But the point in this example was that the Java program ironically had 
the bug *because* Java handles ints in a type-safe way, while Python 
does not.

 >> What's better about the Python version? First, it will operate on
 >> *any* sorted array, no matter which type the values have.
 >
 > Uh huh! With hard-coded < and = operators, how stupid. What if you
 > want to use it on strings?
 > Would that be a case-insensitive lexicographic comparison, or
 > case-insensitive? How do you specify what kind of less-than and equal
 > you want to do?

Where's the problem? The function uses the standard ordering of the 
values you feed to it, i.e. case-insensitive lexicographical order if 
you feed a lis of ordinary tuples of strings. You can also feed objects 
with a different ordering, like case-insensitive.

Anyway, that was completely not the point. The point was that you could 
take that Java program, convert it directly to Python, and have 
automatically eliminated a bug. I did not claim that the resulting 
Python program was automatically a real good and Pythonic one.

 > -1 to indicate not found? Why copy Java braindamage induced by an
 > antiquated form of static typing? The Java version has to do that

So you would call Python's str.find() method braindamaged as well?

But as I said, that was not the point here anyway.

-- Christoph