Yves Glodt wrote: > I am fairly new to python (and I like it more and more), but I can not > answer this question... As I said, where I come from it is possible, and > how they do it is explained a little here: > http://lu.php.net/manual/en/language.types.type-juggling.php
but that page doesn't discuss the same thing; it says is that you don't have to specify the type when you create a variable, which applies to Python too: x = 10 # x is now an integer x = "string" # x is now a string It also says that PHP converts things on the fly when you to operations that involve different types. Python does that for some types... x = 10 + 5.5 # 15.5 x = "hello" + u"world" # u"helloworld" ....but requires you to spell things out in cases where the types don't have a "natural" relation: x = "10" + 20 # should this be 30 or 1020 or "1020" or ...? x = int("10") + 20 # 30 x = "10" + str(20) # "1020" In your case, you're using x.somemethod(somevalue) which only provides two clues: you want x to be something that has a method with a given name, and you're passing in some value. That's not enough information to figure out that you want a list and not some other object that happens to have a method with the same name. </F> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list