Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

[Marshall Spight]

"Pascal Costanza" <costanza at web.de> wrote in message news:bn774d$qj3$1 at newsreader2.netcologne.de...
> >
> > When do programmers know better?  An int is an int and a string is a
> > string, and nary the twain shall be treated the same.  I would rather
> > ``1 + "bar"'' signal an error at compile time than at run time.
>
> Such code would easily be caught very soon in your unit tests.

Provided you think to write such a test, and expend the effort
to do so. Contrast to what happens in a statically typed language,
where this is done for you automatically.

Unit tests are great; I heartily endorse them. But they *cannot*
do everything that static type checking can do. Likewise,
static type checking *cannot* do everything unit testing
can do.

So again I ask, why is it either/or? Why not both? I've had
*great* success building systems with comprehensive unit
test suites in statically typed languages. The unit tests catch
some bugs, and the static type checking catches other bugs.


Marshall