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Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

Pascal Costanza costanza at web.de
Mon Oct 27 20:46:54 EST 2003 
Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote:

> On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 13:40:24 -0500, Matthew Danish wrote:
> 
> 
>>Something that annoys me about many statically-typed languages is the
>>insistence that arithmetic operations should return the same type as the
>>operands.  2 / 4 is 1/2, not 0.  Arithmetically, 1 * 1.0 is
>>well-defined, so why can I not write this in an SML program?
> 
> 
> Confusing integer division with rational division is not a consequence
> of static typing, except that with static typing it's not as dangerous as
> with dynamic typing (because a function declared as taking floating point
> arguments and performing / on them will do the same even if you pass
> integers to it, which in most languages will be automatically converted).

Sorry, I don't get this. Why should it be more dangerous with dynamic 
typing? Common Lisp definitely gets this right, and most probably some 
other dynamically typed languages.

> Mixed-type arithmetic is a different story. I'm talking only about 1/2
> being equal to 0 in some languages - this doesn't coincide with static
> typing.

Yes, dynamic vs static typing seems to be irrelevant here. (Although I 
wonder why you should need to distinguish between / and div...)


Pascal
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