Nice. I've never appreciated type checking at 'compile' time, but I understand why others might (ocd). C was my first exposure to blending types, then Perl was fuzzier, then Python was even better at pretending types didn't matter. Now, with Lisp, I am freed from type concerns... until I'm not. Thankfully, it's my choice. Will On August 3, 2023 9:56:22 AM CDT, Dan Halbert wrote: >Python has optional type annotations. There are batch tools (e.g., MyPy) to do type analysis and IDE's also provide help. Example: > >def greeting(name: str) -> str: >    return 'Hello ' + name > >I found Python to be an enormous improvement over Perl for writing the kinds of things I used to write in Perl, with the Perl book at my side. I currently make my living working on Python for microcontrollers. Neverthless, I am fond of type checking too, and if I were writing a large Python system, I would use type annotations. > >I have used BCPL too, in the 70's, and we achieved some measure of type safety by careful naming. > >Dan H. > >On 8/3/23 10:19, Bakul Shah wrote: >> I have not heard such horror stories about Common Lisp (or may be I have forgotten them!). My impression is that python doesn't quite have the kind of {meta,}programming tools Common Lisp has. CL has been used for large critical programs. Perhaps Von Rossum had more experience with statically typed languages than Lisp (because -- pure speculation here -- if he had used CL enough, he would never have designed python :-) >> >>> On Aug 3, 2023, at 1:32 AM, Rob Pike wrote: >>> >>> I once inherited maintenance of a critical piece of infrastructure written in exquisitely well written, tested, and documented Python. I mean it, it was really really good. >>> >>> It crashed about once a week and I had to fix it over and over because in those exponentially vast combinations of paths through the code would arise yet another way to turn a string into a list, or something analogous. It was hell. >>> >>> Critical code needs static typing. >>> >>> -rob >>> >>> >>> On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 1:56 PM Bakul Shah wrote: >>> >>> python can certainly implement tail call optimization (TCO). >>> Pretty much any language can implement TCO but for some reason >>> people think such programs are harder to debug (and yet they >>> don't similarly complain about loops!). The beauty of Scheme was >>> that it *mandated* tail recursion. >>> >>> > On Aug 2, 2023, at 8:24 PM, George Michaelson >>> wrote: >>> > >>> > Tail recursion not lazy eval. >>> > >>> > I wish words meant what I meant "inside" when I think them, not >>> > "outside" what they mean when I write them. >>> >> -- Sent from /e/OS Mail.