Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 12/07/2007 - 14:45.
"I spent a few weeks... trying to sort out the terminology of "strongly typed," "statically typed," "safe," etc., and found it amazingly difficult.... The usage of these terms is so various as to render them almost useless."
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongly_typed
This seems like an example of people using this term in a way so as to make it useless. The whole point of being strongly typed is to prevent potential runtime errors by detecting problems at compile/parse time. When you can't predict what the legitimate parameters or outputs of a function are, then you'd better give up and accept that you aren't strongly typed for any useful understanding of that term.
My main (only) real problem with Python is semantic white space. It means that a piece of code can "look right" but not "be right", especially if you've copied the snippet from another source file or forum (or it was written by someone else in general). It's just an unfortunate feature given the prevalence of very useful forums these days. Parentheses, for all their religious war issues, are more robust and convey information less ambiguously. You can automatically set indentation from parentheses if it floats you boat.
Strong vs. Weak Typing
"I spent a few weeks... trying to sort out the terminology of "strongly typed," "statically typed," "safe," etc., and found it amazingly difficult.... The usage of these terms is so various as to render them almost useless."
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongly_typed
This seems like an example of people using this term in a way so as to make it useless. The whole point of being strongly typed is to prevent potential runtime errors by detecting problems at compile/parse time. When you can't predict what the legitimate parameters or outputs of a function are, then you'd better give up and accept that you aren't strongly typed for any useful understanding of that term.
My main (only) real problem with Python is semantic white space. It means that a piece of code can "look right" but not "be right", especially if you've copied the snippet from another source file or forum (or it was written by someone else in general). It's just an unfortunate feature given the prevalence of very useful forums these days. Parentheses, for all their religious war issues, are more robust and convey information less ambiguously. You can automatically set indentation from parentheses if it floats you boat.