On Thu, 01 Mar 2007 21:53:09 -0800, Paul Rubin wrote: > Steven D'Aprano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> > That still sounds like an unreliable manual type system, >> It's unreliable in the sense that the coder has to follow the naming >> convention, and must have some bare minimum of sense. If your coders are >> morons, no naming convention will save you. (For that matter, nothing will >> save you.) > > Well, type systems in programming languages have generally proven more > reliable and easier to deal with than having programmers track it all > manually-- that's why we don't all write in Forth ;-).
Apps Hungarian is NOT a type system. Systems Hungarian is. It is pointless: an inefficient, manual nuisance that redundantly does what the type system already does. Even Microsoft agrees with that now. Unless there is a type system that can automatically deal with the semantic difference between (say) screen coordinates and window coordinates, or between height and width, or safe and unsafe strings, the coder still has to deal with it themselves. And even if there is such a type system, Python isn't it. [snip] > You're right that this is not exactly dimensional analysis, but it still > seems to call for types and conversion functions, rather than naming > conventions. The problem with types is that as far as the compiler is concerned, the objects are the same type. Of course it needs conversion functions. Now maybe you could argue that what Microsoft needed was a different language instead of C. Maybe so, but they were working with what they had. Just as we're working with Python. The point I'm trying to get across isn't that Apps Hungarian is the best imaginable solution to the problem of dealing with semantically different kinds of data. But it is an easy solution that works quite well (not perfectly) and (unlike relying on Haskell's type system) it can be applied to Python quite easily. -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
