On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Sean Wolfe <ether....@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello everybody, I'm a happy pythonista newly subscribed to the group. > How is it going? > I have a theoretical / philosophical question regarding strong vs duck > typing in Python. Let's say we wanted to type strongly in Python and > were willing to compromise our code to the extent necessary, eg not > changing variable types or casting or whatever. Let's say there was a > methodology in Python to declare variable types.
Do you think everyone who uses the code you write wants to deal with your type decisions? > The question is, given this possibility, would this get us closer to > being able to compile down to a language like C or C++? Declaring types would enable some additional optimizations, yes. No, it isn't worth it. > What I am driving at is, if we are coding in python but looking for > more performance, what if we had an option to 1) restrict ourselves > somewhat by using strong typing to 2) make it easy to compile or > convert down to C++ and thereby gain more performance. Take a look at PyPy, with RPython. That is the most future proof, forward thinking way of doing what you want. > It seems to be that accepting the restrictions of strong typing might > be worth it in certain circumstances. Basically the option to use a > strongly-typed Python as desired. Does this get us closer to being > able to convert to Cpp? Does the Cython project have anything to do > with this? Declared typing is mostly annoying. Implicit static typing is less annoying, but still has issues. Cython fills the same niche as PyPy's Rpython. Use it if you have a lot of C code you want to call, as you will get better performance than a wrapper like SWIG. Nathan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
