Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

[Fergus Henderson]

Pascal Costanza <costanza at web.de> writes:
>I am not sure if I understand you correctly, but are you actually 
>suggesting that it is better to reimplement Common Lisp on your own than 
>to just use one of the various Common Lisp implementations?

No.  I'm just pointing out that these sort of things can be implemented
in statically typed languages without much difficulty.  Generally
I _don't_ want to reimplement Common Lisp.  If on occaision I do need
some dynamic binding, or dynamic typing, say, then this need is usually
localized within a small part of the application, and so I can implement
what I need very easily.

Your article that I was responding to was suggesting that there might
be some things which could not be done in statically typed languages,
and in particular that this sort of eval(read()) loop might be one of them.
As I hope I've demonstrated, it is not.

So in answer to question "d" in that post of yours, "would you still
disagree with the assessment there is a class of programs that can be
implemented with dynamically typed languages but without statically
typed ones?", I would say yes, I still disagree.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.