On 10/12/2015 07:30 AM, Bartc wrote: > On 12/10/2015 03:45, Michael Torrie wrote: >> 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. > > I've surprised Basic needs it. The last time I looked, $A was a string, > %B an integer, and C a number. Type inference wasn't hard!
Back in the day this was certainly true. Most modern Basic dialects are more C-like in their declarations. > (And trying Freebasic, it insists on variables being declared anyway. > It's rather like C but with Basic syntax.) FB could be considered C-like with a Basic syntax, yes, but with dynamic strings and dynamic arrays. This idea of being c-like makes FB kind of interesting but uninteresting at the same time. Kind of hard to come up with a good reason to use it for something, especially when a dynamic language like Python, combined with C, is so flexible. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list