On 2006-06-14 15:04:34 -0400, Joachim Durchholz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> Um... heterogenous lists are not necessarily a sign of expressiveness. > The vast majority of cases can be transformed to homogenous lists > (though these might then contain closures or OO objects). > > As to references to nonexistent functions - heck, I never missed these, > not even in languages without type inference :-) > > I don't hold that they are a sign of *in*expressiveness either. They > are just typical of highly dynamic programming environments such as > Lisp or Smalltalk. This is a typical static type advocate's response when told that users of dynamically typed languages don't want their hands tied by a type checking compiler: "*I* don't find those features expressive so *you* shouldn't want them." You'll have to excuse us poor dynamically typed language rubes - we find these features expressive and we don't want to give them up just to silence a compiler whose static type checks are of dubious value in a world where user inputs of an often unpredictable nature can come at a program from across a potentially malicious internet making run-time checks a practical necessity. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
