Anton van Straaten wrote: > > But beyond that, there's an issue here about the definition of "the > language". When programming in a latently-typed language, a lot of > action goes on outside the language - reasoning about static properties > of programs that are not captured by the semantics of the language. > > This means that there's a sense in which the language that the > programmer programs in is not the same language that has a formal > semantic definition. As I mentioned in another post, programmers are > essentially mentally programming in a richer language - a language which > has informal (static) types - but the code they write down elides this > type information, or else puts it in comments. > > We have to accept, then, that the formal semantic definitions of > dynamically-checked languages are incomplete in some important ways. > Referring to those semantic definitions as "the language", as though > that's all there is to the language in a broader sense, is misleading. > > In this context, the term "latently-typed language" refers to the > language that a programmer experiences, not to the subset of that > language which is all that we're typically able to formally define.
That is starting to get a bit too mystical for my tastes. Marshall -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list