Simon Percivall wrote: > First: It's perfectly simple in Java to create a binary sort that > sorts all arrays that contain objects; so wrong there.
My point was that the *same* Java source example, directly converted to Python would *automatically* accept all kinds of arrays. No need to make any extra efforts. By the way, how would you do it in Java? With function overloading? I would not call that perfectly simple. > Secondly: The bug has nothing to do with static typing (I'm guessing > that's what you meant. Both Python and Java are strongly typed). The > problem is that ints are bounded in Java. They could easily have been > ints and then automatically coerced to (equivalent to) longs when they > got bigger; that they aren't is more a design fault than anything to > do with static typing. The equivalent in Python would have been if an > overflow exception was raised when the int got too big. It might have > been that way, typing or no typing. Yes, sorry, I meant static typing, not strict typing. But I still do think that the bug has to do with static typing. You're right, the direct cause is that ints are bounded in Java, and not bounded in Python, and that it could well be the other way round. However, doing it the other way round would not be so clever and appropriate for the respective language due to the difference in static typing. Java could coerce the result to long, but then it would still crash when the result is stored back to the statically typed variable. So that would not be very clever. And Python could produce an overflow error (and did in the past), but taking advantage of the possibilities of dynamic typing and automatically producing longs is a cleverer solution for Python, and that's why it was proposed and accepted in PEP237. So the difference in static typing is actually the deeper reason why ints were made to behave differently in the two languages. -- Christoph -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
