Are the critiques in "All the things I hate about Python" valid?

[bartc]

On 20/02/2018 20:17, MRAB wrote:
> On 2018-02-20 19:17, bartc wrote:
>> On 20/02/2018 19:04, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>>> On Tue, 20 Feb 2018 17:11:05 +0000, "Wild, Marcel, Prof 
>>> <mwild at sun.ac.za>"
>>> <mwild at sun.ac.za> declaimed the following:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> So the special type of the values 65..90 might not allow the type be 
>>>> multiplied or divided, or added to itself. Because they represent 
>>>> characters A..Z. Or house numbers. Or the age of pensioners. (You'd 
>>>> need to convert to ordinary integers, is that is allowed.)
>>>
>>>
>>>     Off-hand -- if you are storing the /age of pensioners/, you have an
>>> inappropriate data model... Age being a time varying value computed as:
>>>         time_now - date_of_birth
>>> and date_of_birth is the proper entity for storage...
>>
>> If you wanted a scientifically exact value, maybe.
>>
>> But someone who's 24.157094 years old now won't say their age is
>> 24.157094 (and 24.157104 five minutes later). They will usually say they
>> are 24, until they are 25 (much older people prefer to round upwards,
>> for some reason).
>>
>> So age is usually colloquially specified as an integer from 1 to around
>> 100. Other than for young children where the lack of precision requires
>> the use of fractions or to switch to whole numbers of months or weeks.
>>
> The point he was making is that if you store a person's age, you'd have 
> to update it every year. It's far better to store the date of birth and 
> calculate the age on demand.

People are making too much of my example of a type consisting of a set 
of special values.

Anyway the values might not relate to an individual; they could be 
indices into a data structure so that C[65] gives you the number of 
65-year-olds or something, or 67 is the age at which someone is entitled 
to a pension.

-- 
bartc