Actually, you're wrong on all levels. First: It's perfectly simple in Java to create a binary sort that sorts all arrays that contain objects; so wrong there.
Secondly: The bug has nothing to do with static typing (I'm guessing that's what you meant. Both Python and Java are strongly typed). The problem is that ints are bounded in Java. They could easily have been ints and then automatically coerced to (equivalent to) longs when they got bigger; that they aren't is more a design fault than anything to do with static typing. The equivalent in Python would have been if an overflow exception was raised when the int got too big. It might have been that way, typing or no typing. Christoph Zwerschke wrote: > You will often hear that for reasons of fault minimization, you should > use a programming language with strict typing: > http://turing.une.edu.au/~comp284/Lectures/Lecture_18/lecture/node1.html > > I just came across a funny example in which the opposite is the case. > > The following is a binary search algorithm in Java. It searches a value > in an ordered array a of ints: > > public static int binarySearch(int[] a, int key) { > int low = 0; > int high = a.length - 1; > while (low <= high) { > int mid = (low + high) / 2; > int midVal = a[mid]; > if (midVal < key) > low = mid + 1; > else if (midVal > key) > high = mid - 1; > else > return mid; // key found > } > return -(low + 1); // key not found. > } > > Now the same thing, directly converted to Python: > > def binarySearch(a, key): > low = 0 > high = len(a) - 1 > while low <= high: > mid = (low + high) / 2 > midVal = a[mid] > if midVal < key: > low = mid + 1 > elif midVal > key: > high = mid - 1; > else: > return mid # key found > return -(low + 1) # key not found. > > What's better about the Python version? First, it will operate on *any* > sorted array, no matter which type the values have. > > But second, there is a hidden error in the Java version that the Python > version does not have. > > See the following web page if you dont find it ;-) > http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html > > -- Christoph -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
