syntax difference

[Bart]

On 18/06/2018 15:03, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> It is 2018. People who say that static typing cannot be integrated with
> dynamic languages are nearly half a century behind the state of the art
> in computer programming.

It can be, but it spoils the language. In the case of Python, it is 
already so big and has so many features crammed in that adding type 
hints probably makes little difference.

I spent a bit of time a decade ago with adding type hints to my own 
dynamic language. It was done to improve performance, and yes some 
benchmarks could be double the speed.

In the end I got rid of them to keep the language purer, smaller and 
simpler. Other approaches which don't involve annotating source code 
(eg. type inference) are better IMO.

One problem with them was that, if you said X was an int, you were 
obliged to check it was int, otherwise bad things could happen if it 
assumed X was int because you said so, and in reality it wasn't. That 
checking doesn't help improve performance, which was one aim.

-- 
bart