On Jan 14, 8:16 pm, Paul Rubin <http://phr...@nospam.invalid> wrote: > I have a situation which I face almost every day, where I have some > gigabytes of data that I want to slice and dice somehow and get some > numbers out of. I spend 15 minutes writing a one-off Python program > and then several hours waiting for it to run. > Often, the Python program crashes halfway through, even though I > tested it on a few megabytes of data before starting the full > multi-gigabyte run, because it hit some unexpected condition in the > data that could have been prevented with more compile time checking > that made sure the structures understood by the one-off script matched > the ones in the program that generated the input data.
I know the feeling. The worse thing is when you have a stupid typo (which would be immediately caught by a compiler) which affects a section of the code that runs after 8 hours of computations. Pylint helps - when you remember torun it on all your code base - but it is definitely not the same as a compiler. > I would be ecstatic with a version of Python where I might have to > spend 20 minutes instead of 15 minutes writing the program, but then > it runs in half an hour instead of several hours and doesn't crash. I > think the Python community should be aiming towards this. Dunno. Python has been designed from the start to be fully dynamic and with no type checks, I don't think it is really possible to change that. On the other hand, one could envision a Python-like language with more type safety (there are already a few experiments in that direction). Personally, I would be glad to trade some flexibility for additional safety; if you we get more speed as an additional bonus, that's fine too. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
