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Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

prunesquallor at comcast.net prunesquallor at comcast.net
Sat Oct 25 13:33:13 EDT 2003 
gt5163b at prism.gatech.edu (Brian McNamara!) writes:

> "Marshall Spight" <mspight at dnai.com> once said:
>><prunesquallor at comcast.net> wrote in message news:wuaufe52.fsf at comcast.net...
>>> "Marshall Spight" <mspight at dnai.com> writes:
>>> > It would be really interesting to see a small but useful example
>>> > of a program that will not pass a statically typed language.
>>> > It seems to me that how easy it is to generate such programs
>>> > will be an interesting metric.
>>>
>>> Would this count?
>>>
>>> (defun noisy-apply (f arglist)
>>>   (format t "I am now about to apply ~s to ~s" f arglist)
>>>   (apply f arglist))
>>
>>Interesting, interesting. Thanks for taking me seriously!
>>
>>I'm trying to map this program into Java, and it's possible
> ...
>>Anyone have any comments?
>
> Well, in C++ you could say
>
>    template <class F, class A>
>    typename result_of<F(A)>::type
>    noisy_apply( const F& f, const A& a ) {
>       cout << "I am now about to apply " << f << " to " << a << endl;
>       return f(a);
>    }
>

I don't mean to nitpick, but APPLY takes an arbitrary list of arguments.
How do you parameterize over that without enumerating the power set
of potential types?

What if F `returns' void?
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