Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> writes: > On Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:35:12 +1100, Ben Finney wrote: > > That feels too magical to me. I don't see a need to special-case > > that usage. There's not much burden in being explicit for the > > argument type. > > And yet you are programming in Python instead of Java, Pascal or Ada > :)
That's a good point :-) > It's not magic at all, it's science! Or to be precise, it's a very simple > form of type inference Right. I dislike proposals for run-time type inference in Python, since they are too magical. Especially since we're talking about user input (arguments from the command line to the program); that requires more explicit declarations and checking, not less. > What if you want an argument --foo that will accept arbitrary types? Then > you would need some way to tell argparse not to infer the type from the > default. So we would then need to special-case the special-case? Even more reason to dislike this proposal. > Explicit declarations should be used only for the uncommon cases where > type inference cannot cope. That's our point of disagreement, then: I think explicit declarations should be required regarding user input. -- \ “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against | `\ unintelligible propositions.” —Thomas Jefferson, 1816-07-30 | _o__) | Ben Finney -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list