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Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

Marshall Spight mspight at dnai.com
Thu Oct 23 03:15:09 EDT 2003 
"Pascal Costanza" <costanza at web.de> wrote in message news:bn7a3p$1h6$1 at newsreader2.netcologne.de...
>
> I wouldn't count the use of java.lang.Object as a case of dynamic
> typing. You need to explicitly cast objects of this type to some class
> in order to make useful method calls. You only do this to satisfy the
> static type system. (BTW, this is one of the sources for potential bugs
> that you don't have in a decent dynamically typed language.)

Huh? The explicit-downcast construct present in Java is the
programmer saying to the compiler: "trust me; you can accept
this type of parameter." In a dynamically-typed language, *every*
call is like this! So if this is a source of errors (which I believe it
is) then dynamically-typed languages have this potential source
of errors with every function call, vs. statically-typed languages
which have them only in those few cases where the programmer
explicitly puts them in.


Marshall
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