PEP 3107 and stronger typing (note: probably a newbie question)
Bruno Desthuilliers
bdesth.quelquechose at free.quelquepart.fr
Thu Jul 5 00:51:25 EDT 2007
Paul Rubin a écrit :
> Bruno Desthuilliers <bruno.42.desthuilliers at wtf.websiteburo.oops.com> writes:
>
>>Because static type checks impose a lot of arbitrary restrictions,
>>boilerplate code etc, which tends to make code more complicated than
>>it needs to be, which is a good way of introducing bugs that wouldn't
>>have existed without static type checks.
>
>
> Why do you say that? By metrics and anecdotal evidence, Haskell code
> appears to be at least as compact as Python code.
Haskell - as other languages using type-inference like OCaml - are in a
different category. Yes, I know, don't say it, they are statically typed
- but it's mostly structural typing, not declarative typing. Which makes
them much more usable IMHO. It's too bad they are not more widely adopted.
>>Depending on the application domain and some technical and
>>non-technical constraints and requirements, it (often) happens that
>>it's better to have the application deployed now with an occasional
>>error message than to have it next year...
>
>
> I suppose that includes the thing I'm currently working on.
>
> For
> some other stuff I've done, such errors would have caused huge hassles,
> lost customer money, etc.
Still, static typechecking is not a garantee against runtime errors. Nor
against logical errors.
>
>>And FWIW, when it comes to "weird piece of input data", statically
>>typed languages are not specially better than dynamic ones...
>
> I know that ML gives compiler warning messages if you have a pattern
> match (sort of a variant of a case statement, not a regexp match)
I know what pattern matching is, I did play a bit with OCaml and Haskell.
> which is non-exhaustive. And Haskell's Maybe monad is part of an
> idiom that handles failing computations (like regexp matches) much
> more gracefully than Python can. Both of those would help this
> situation.
I'd have to see a concrete use case. And I'd need much more real-world
experience with some ML variant, but this is not something I can expect
to happen in a near future - it's difficult enough to convince PHBs that
Python is fine.
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