Adding static typing to Python

[Courageous]

>Thanks for the link. Reading it makes me wonder if some sort of partial
>static typing would be beneficial, e.g. if the compiler was able to
>determine up front that X is an atomic ...

That's everyone's first thought, however in the generation of
a compiler, several other first steps are necessary to achieve
performance; these steps can be achieved without static typing
or even compiler hints. While optional static declarations are
high on the list of things that can increase performance in a
compiled python executible, there are things which are higher
and have nevertheless not been done. That they haven't means in
my mind that we should stop, and not add (optional) static typing
until and unless they have. Because right now it would be mostly
linguistic masturbation and not really help anything at all.

If you're thinking that the compiler folks haven't made any
progress because strictly there's no static type system, you'd
be wrong.

C//