does lack of type declarations make Python unsafe?

[John J. Lee]

Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> writes:
[...]
> But this has little to do with the need of 'type declarations'.  I
> suspect that a statically typed language would also be better off
> without them, relying on type inferencing instead, a la Haskell (and
> Haskell's typeclasses to keep the inferencing as wide as feasible),
> for example.  But I have no research to back this up;-).

Let me magically conjure into existence a really nice language based
on static type inference (let's have it beautifully designed, learning
as many lessons from Python as possible, with oodles of good library
code, including easy connection to C, C++, Java, COM, .NET, CORBA
etc...).

Are you going to switch your most frequent first-choice from Python to
this statically-typed language?

That's *not* a rhetorical question: I don't know the answer.


John