[Python-Dev] type categories

[Oren Tirosh]

On Sat, Aug 24, 2002 at 11:33:38PM +0200, Alex Martelli wrote:
> > I am not talking about situations where the object does not meet your
> > expectations and needs to be adapted - I'm talking about situations where
> > it actually does and the only problem is how to describe that fact
> > properly.
> 
> Adaptation IS one way to "describe that fact properly", given that checks
> are anyway constrained to happen at runtime.  You just install an
> adapter from objects x of class X to protocol Y that receives x as
> an argument and whose body is just "return x" -- that's all.

I don't take it as given that "checks are anyway constrain to happen at
runtime". I prefer a system that is future-proof enough to evolve into 
something that the compiler can use to do type inference. That is one 
of the reasons I don't want a typeclass / type category / interface /
/ type expression / whateveryouyouwannacallit to call any user-written
Python code. (I don't want Python to become of those languages where user 
code can execute at compile time :-)

> ... what's the gain that would justify a further, special-purpose 
> mechanism that's usable only (e.g.) when all of X's methods already have 
> the right name and order of parameters, but then we'd have to switch to 
> another if there is renaming or reordering to be done?  

Being able to eventually perform many type checks earlier - at compile 
time or at module load time. Renaming and reordering really does have to 
be done at runtime in a dynamically typed language. 

	Oren