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Adding static typing to Python

Quinn Dunkan quinn at regurgitate.ugcs.caltech.edu
Tue Feb 19 16:51:41 EST 2002 
> On 19 Feb 2002, Quinn Dunkan wrote:
> > Or you can just look and see how the 'person' is used in the function.  If 
> the
> > first statement is a 'o = db.by_id[person]' then you know it's an id.  If i
> t
> 
> An even better approach is to ask yourself: if it's a person's ID, then
> why isn't the variable named personID?

I didn't say that because the OP could have objected that "then you're just
encoding the type information in the variable name".

And I would agree with him to an extent.  Naming variables based on their type
leads to the same problem you get in static systems, when the type becomes
obsolete.  The variable doesn't actually have to be an id, it just has to be
something that you can look up in the db.  So the actual type requirements are
in whoever is calling the function, and the db object.  They could both change,
and now 'personID' is misleadingly named.  (of course, 'db.by_id' would then
also be misnamed, but lets assume it was a more generic 'db[...]')

Taken to its logical extreme, this seems to imply that all variable names
should be quite vague if the function is just passing it along, which could get
silly.  But taking things to their logical extremes often does get silly :)
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