does lack of type declarations make Python unsafe?

[David Abrahams]

Steven Taschuk <staschuk at telusplanet.net> writes:

> Quoth John J. Lee:
>> Steven Taschuk <staschuk at telusplanet.net> writes:
>   [...]
>> > But I find it greatly eases
>> > debugging and one-off data munging tasks.
>> 
>> That's what I was referring to, and I assume David too.  If any
>> function or class is more than say 5 lines, I use emacs.  [...]
>
> Hm... then I think I'm missing something.
>
> When debugging, all the substantial code is written elsewhere; I
> just import it and fiddle.  When data munging, I load the data
> into memory and fiddle.  Each fiddle is almost invariably a single
> line of code, so errors are not big setbacks.

These lines invariably turn into regression tests, so I want to be
working from my IDE anyway.  Doctest rules!

>> [...] It's still
>> convenient, but can be replaced quite easily with a good IDE, I think.
>
> I'm not sure how an IDE would help with interactive data-munging,
> unless it provides an environment very similar to the one which
> the interactive prompt provides.

Edit test script, run python on it, repeat...

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com