Summary: strong/weak typing and pointers

[exarkun at divmod.com]

On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 17:02:24 +0000 (UTC), Steven Bethard <steven.bethard at gmail.com> wrote:
>Diez B. Roggisch <deetsNOSPAM <at> web.de> writes:
> > 
> > I'd second that - writing apus in php can lead to great surprises of what
> > actually happens - take this for example:
> > 
> > $foo = "abc";
> > $foo[0] = 65;
> > 
> > The result is 
> > 
> > "6bc"
> 
> If I learned nothing else from this thread, I learned that I *never* want to
> screw around with PHP. ;)
> 
> > And don't forget: If you don't like the way someone overloaded some
> > operator, you can alter that behaviour according to your own design
> > philosophies.
> 
> Python has the nice property that you're not allowed to modify builtins, so no
> one can ever make your Python code do anything other than:
> 
> >>> foo = 'abc'
> >>> foo[0] = 65
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ?
> TypeError: object does not support item assignment
> 

  Not quite.  Anything is possible, with the right extension modules:

Python 2.3 (#3, Jan 26 2004, 21:50:33)
[GCC 2.95.3 20010315 (release)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import intrinsics, become
>>> class phpstr(str):
...     def __setitem__(self, index, value):
...             become.memwrite(id(self) + 20 + index, str(value)[0])
... 
>>> oldstr = intrinsics.replace(str, phpstr)
>>> foo = 'abc'
>>> foo[0] = 65
>>> foo
'6bc'
>>>

  doing-the-impossib-ly yrs,

  Jp