Ian Bicking: the old part of his blog

PyCon: Optional Static Typing

Guido brought up static typing in his keynote, revisiting that contentious topic. He actually wasn't that positive about it -- he was interested but not confident at all. What kind of disappointed me is that what he described can be implemented right now using decorators, with only a slightly different syntax. You couldn't infer typing by parsing the source, but parsing Python source is always a horrible way to find out stuff about the code. To programmatically understand Python code, you run the code, that's just the way it is, and that can work fine if we all just come to terms with that -- not only work fine, it is a real asset of Python. Python code is code that builds objects. The objects are the important thing, the code that builds them is incidental.
Created 25 Mar '05