From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <13426df10701171309w65f11042l413cbcad22e7993f@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:09:12 -0700
From: "ron minnich" <rminnich@gmail.com>
To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
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Subject: [9fans] Python cleverness
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 058e11a8-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

There are 1300 cases in Python of different type signatures for calls
to the same function.

I think this is some new, powerful, programming model, where you call
things with structures that could be the same but really aren't. I
guess the idea is that the common elements of the structure are all
the same, and declared first, so really, everything should just work
out fine, even though the structures are all different. Everything's
fine, don't worry, lie back and think of England.

(Warning! cultural reference ahead! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollyanna)
I think we can call it Pollyanna-morphism.
(now, for those of you who got it, you have to admit that's a pretty
good joke:-)

I also expect that, were I to go to the Python community, and mention
that this might be an issue with type-safe linking, that I would not
get an enthusiastic reception. It's just too embedded in the code, and
it's so clear that it is intended to work this way, that I doubt it is
an accident of some sort.

Therefore, I'm going to try to see if I can make 8l issue a warning
only for incompatible type signatures. I already tried just not
incrementing nerror in the diag call, but this still is not giving me
an 8.out; clearly I'm missing something.

But, if I can get this, we should have dynamic modules in Python, and
I get to check that box, since python and dynamic modules have become
very important to supercomputer applications writers. There, I said
that without grimacing :-)

ron