On 10/11/2015 06:34 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > That's called type inference, and there's nothing innovative about Swift to > include that as a feature. Type inference is *old*. The theory behind type > inference goes back to 1958, and languages such as ML and OCaml have > included it for decades, and yet here we are in 2015 and people think that > it's something cool and new :-(
C++ introduced it a while ago (C++11), and D has had it from the beginning. Even lowly FreeBasic has it. It's certainly nice and it can be a time saver. Though it's only useful in certain places, such as when declaring a variable and an initializer. While it can be used for the return type of a function, in practice I've found it to not be that useful when you are making a function that is going to be called by someone else. You can't just stick an automatic reference in a .h file, for example. Anyway, I guess our OP is another example of a drive-by poster who took a brief look at Python then came here to try make a point of some kind, and then disappeared, perhaps realizing that he probably should have gained a bit more understanding of Python before trying to make said point. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list