Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

[Pascal Costanza]

Fergus Henderson wrote:

> 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.

And you're right in this regard. My statement was too strong. Of course 
it is always possible to reimplement a dynamic language on top of a 
static one and by this get the full expressive power of a dynamic 
language. But I didn't have Turing equivalence in mind when I made that 
statement. The real question is how hard it is to reimplement a dynamic 
language, and wouldn't it be a better idea to use a dynamic language 
when the requirements are of the sort that, when in doubt, flexibility 
turns out to be more important than stacity.


Pascal

-- 
Pascal Costanza               University of Bonn
mailto:costanza at web.de        Institute of Computer Science III
http://www.pascalcostanza.de  Römerstr. 164, D-53117 Bonn (Germany)