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Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

prunesquallor at comcast.net prunesquallor at comcast.net
Sun Oct 26 19:00:00 EST 2003 
Joachim Durchholz <joachim.durchholz at web.de> writes:

> There's also a narrow and a broad sense here: obviously, it's not
> possible to type check all Lisp idioms, but are we allowed to present
> alternative idioms that do type check and serve the same purpose?

I don't have a problem with this, but I don't want to split hairs on
what constitutes an `idiom' vs. what constitutes a complete rewrite.

Presumably, an alternative idiom would involve only *local* changes,
not global ones, and could be performed incrementally, i.e., each
use of an idiom could be independently replaced and thus reduce the
the the type checking errors.

If a change involves pervasive edits, say, for instance, editing all
callers of some function to pass an extra argument, or wrapping a
conditional branch around all uses of an object, that would not be
an alternative idiom.
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