Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

[Jon S. Anthony]

"Marshall Spight" <mspight at dnai.com> writes:

> <prunesquallor at comcast.net> wrote in message news:wuaufe52.fsf at comcast.net...
> > "Marshall Spight" <mspight at dnai.com> writes:
> >
> > > It would be really interesting to see a small but useful example
> > > of a program that will not pass a statically typed language.
> > > It seems to me that how easy it is to generate such programs
> > > will be an interesting metric.
> >
> > Would this count?
> >
> > (defun noisy-apply (f arglist)
> >   (format t "I am now about to apply ~s to ~s" f arglist)
> >   (apply f arglist))
> 
> Interesting, interesting. Thanks for taking me seriously!
> 
> I'm trying to map this program into Java, and it's possible

Isn't Java a particularly bad thing to try here?

> but there are enough different ways to go about it that
> I'm having a hard time reasoning about the result.
> 
> For one thing, what would f be? Probably an instance of

As written, f can be any object of any type.  arglist is any set of
arguments with arity 0 to <hardware limit>. It will do something
useful in all cases and something more useful if f is a function

/Jon