[Python-Dev] Possible ideas from Strongtalk (static typing for Smalltalk)?

[Guido van Rossum]

> I recently came across an announcement about the the Strongtalk system, 
> which contains the first fully developed strong, static type system for 
> Smalltalk. I wondered whether there might be useful ideas there for those 
> looking into static typing for Python.
> 
> http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/projects/strongtalk/pages/index.html

You have to download and install their Windows app and run it in order
to get some documentation about the type system.  I did, and it's
pretty theoretically clean (as you'd expect from a Smalltalk system).
It has a pretty conventional way to describe method signatures,
including a way to define type variables implicitly, so you can define
e.g. a function taking two lists whose return type is a tuple of the
item types of the arguments.  One thing that I hadn't seen before is
the little language they use that allows you to say things like that.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)