Does Python really follow its philosophy of "Readability counts"?

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

Paul Rubin a écrit :
> "James Mills" <prologic at shortcircuit.net.au> writes:
>> Python is a dynamic object oriented language ...  (almost verbatim
>> from the website). It is compiled to bytecode and run on a virtual
>> machine.
> 
> 1. There is nothing inherent about dynamic languages that prevents
> them from being compiled.  There are compiled implementations of
> Lisp and Scheme that beat the pants off of Python in performance.

Yes. If you're really that concerned about Python's performances, you 
may want to contribute to Pypy.

> 2. There is also nothing inherent in a dynamic OO language that says
> that class descriptors have to be mutable,

Nope, but that's how Python is designed, and we are quite a few here 
that value this more than raw perfs.

> any more than strings have
> to be mutable (Python has immutable strings).  I agree that being able
> to modify class descriptors at runtime is sometimes very useful.  The
> feature shouldn't be eliminated from Python or else it wouldn't be
> Python any more.  But those occasions are rare enough that having to
> enable the feature by saying (e.g.) "@dynamic" before the class
> definition doesn't seem like a problem,

This imply that you (as the library author) pretend to know by advance 
when your users (programmers) will have a need for dynamism and when 
they won't. Fact is : you never know. It's the same old horse as 
enforcing access restriction : the net result is that you prevent users 
(which, I repeat, are programmers) to use your library as they see fit.