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Python and generic programming

Hans Nowak hans at zephyrfalcon.org
Tue Oct 26 18:42:21 EDT 2004 
Christophe Cavalaria wrote:
> Oliver Fromme wrote:
> 
>>The appropriate type checking is done at compile time.  That
>>is, if your program calls sort with two lists of different
>>type (e.g. a list of strings and a list of ints), then the
>>compiler will detect that and report an error.
> 
> 
> This must be a bad example because I expect to be able to sort a list of
> integers and a list of strings with the same sort function.

You can, actually:

# let l = ["foo"; "bar"; "baz"; "etc"];;
val l : string list = ["foo"; "bar"; "baz"; "etc"]
# sort l;;
- : string list = ["bar"; "baz"; "etc"; "foo"]

# sort [5; 7; 3; -3; 0; 8; 12];;
- : int list = [-3; 0; 3; 5; 7; 8; 12]

...so I don't really understand what Oliver meant by that statement. 
The sort function will not work on lists that have different types in 
them, but that's a different issue.

-- 
Hans Nowak
http://zephyrfalcon.org/
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