Roy Smith wrote:
In perl, I always use "use strict", but in Python, I just don't feel the need. Between the exception mechanism and unit tests, the odds of a typo going unnoticed for very long are pretty slim. I'll admit I don't use Pychecker, but if I was doing production code, I would probably use it as part of my QA process.
Well, I don't have any experience with Python in the industrial setting (all my Python has been solo so far). I do have quite a bit of experience with Erlang (http://www.erlang.org) though, and while I agree that it's not quite as bad in practice as the most vocal static typing people would have it, it's not all roses either. The problem with unit tests is that they can be skipped (and frequently are) and you also have to be certain you exercise all code paths, even to detect a simple typo.
It's not that these survive for 'very long' or (God forbid) to the final product, but many of them survive for long enough that they cost more than they should/would have. So *if* (substantial 'if' I realise that) my Erlang experiences generalises to this case, I'd say the benefits would outweigh the cost.
Then again I'm seriously considering going back to Haskell, so I guess I'm at least a little biased. :-) :-)
Stefan, -- Stefan Axelsson (email at http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~sax) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
