Paul Boddie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... > The context was whether you can know before running the program whether > the function you're attempting to call exists, along with where it is > defined. Obviously, it's a struggle to think of cases where one would > do this for the sake of it (especially with hard-coded string > literals), but where one wants to take some value (eg. a class name) > and dispatch to some callable (eg. some visitor handler method) based > on that dynamic information, it's a useful technique. Whether > widespread usage of such a technique counts as advocacy is a matter I > don't find particularly interesting to discuss. > > Or should I be looking for some other context here?
The context is: can any other language be different in this respect? Only by not allowing *any* way to get symbols dynamically, and therefore by substantially reducing the real-world cases in which it's usable. C++ (with dlopen/dlsym and equivalent libraries on other platforms, with dynamic_cast, ...) and Java (with 'reflection' etc) do afford this functionality, albeit in more cumbersome ways than Python. Therefore, if the inability to verify that a function named 'foobar' is in fact never called anywhere is a weakness, it's a weakness shared by all of these languages. The originator of this thread appeared to assume that it was a weakness of Python and not of C++... Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
