Typing system vs. Java

[Bengt Richter]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2001 13:29:06 +0200, "Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote:
[...]
>
>My basic take on things?  That trying to design "one language
>to bind them all" is a doomed pursuit; that multi-language
>systems are here to stay, and to grow; trying to be all things
>to all people makes a language too rich and complex, and the
>complexity itself weighs it down.  Maybe a language can afford
>optional type-annotations and so on (I truly hope so, since
>I'd love to have them), maybe it can afford multi-dispatching
>(again, I sure HOPE it can!), maybe it can afford sophisticated
>macro systems (and here, I start to have my doubts!), and so on,
>and so forth... but striving to cover *all* the bases conflicts
>inevitably with the SIMPLICITY that should be a very important
>meta-goal of any language's design.
>
It strikes me that a lot of human creations seem inevitably
to go through a Baroque phase, whether it's architecture, painting,
music, gizmos, or programming languages.

One optional type-like hint I'd like to pass to Python's compiler
is 'pure' with respect to a function definition, with a view to
generating an alternate type of code object to live alongside the
existing one. It could safely be ignored, but if an alternative
compilation process were available, e.g., for a particular platform,
then it could kick in.