In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Steve Holden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Paul Rubin wrote: > > Antoon Pardon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > >>>Or you just code without declaring, intending to go > >>>back and do it later, and invariably forget. > >> > >>What's the problem, the compilor will allert you > >>to your forgetfullness and you can then correct > >>them all at once. > > > > > > Thiat in fact happens to me all the time and is an annoying aspect of > > Python. If I forget to declare several variables in C, the compiler > > gives me several warning messages and I fix them in one edit. If I > > forget to initialize several variables in Python, I need a separate > > test-edit cycle to hit the runtime error for each one. > > Well I hope you aren't suggesting that declaring variables makes it > impossible to forget to initalise them. So I don;t really see the > relevance of this remark, since you simply add an extra run to fix up > the "forgot to declare" problem. After that you get precisely one > runtime error per "forgot to initialize". It's hard to say what anyone's suggesting, unless some recent utterance from GvR has hinted at a possible declaration syntax in future Pythons. Short of that, it's ... a universe of possibilities, none of them likely enough to be very interesting. In the functional language approach I'm familiar with, you introduce a variable into a scope with a bind - let a = expr in ... do something with a and initialization is part of the package. Type is usually inferred. The kicker though is that the variable is never reassigned. In the ideal case it's essentially an alias for the initializing expression. That's one possibility we can probably not find in Python's universe. Donn Cave, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list