Paul Rubin wrote:
I do believe that it's a horrible deficiency in Python that it has no declarations at all, even optional ones, like "perl -w" or "use strict". Python's scoping hacks that result from the lack of declarations just seem to me like pure insanity.
Yes, ignoring most of the debate about static vs. dynamic typing, I've also longed for 'use strict'. Sure Python isn't as bad as (say) Awk in this respect; you have to at least assign a variable to make it spring into existence, but I've been bitten by typos there as well. Same when it comes to object methods (I can often never remember my method names).
Pychecker helps to some extent, but I wouldn't mind a compiler that only accepted identifiers that had been declared. I don't think that anyone could argue that typing 'use apa' before the first actual use (or words to that effect) would 'slow them down', or be very onerous.
Stefan, -- Stefan Axelsson (email at http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~sax) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
