> -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] > On Behalf Of Edward K. Ream > Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 8:14 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: On Topic: Intuition Pumps
[snip] > "The general technique of making a more-or-less educated guess, working > out its implications, and using the result to make a correction for the next > phase has found many applications." Okay. > 1. "Isn't it true that Python and C programmers design their programs in > pretty much exactly the same way? If so, what *exactly* is it about C that > could not be duplicated in Python?" Here is my guess. Please help me work out the implications (probably by performing an experiment or finding relevant reference material). In a statically typed environment (C?), a string "Hello" stored at memory location 1100 ends at memory location 1105 and looks like this on the wire: "Hello". (Bits actually, you know.) In a dynamically typed environment (Python?), a string "Hello" stored at memory location 1100 ends at memory location 1134 and looks like this on the wire: "STRING;CHARSET=UTF-8;CONTENT=Hello". (Bits, actually, and obviously all the content other than Hello could be encoded in a far more space efficient way than I've done here, you know, by representing that information in some binary form.) I believe that the great compile-time (static) typing vs. run-time (dynamic) typing debate goes like this: Well, how do you know what type of data is at location 1100? Static typing response: I put it there, and during compile time I checked all the other bits of code that might ever read that location, and I'm sure they already know what type it is, too. Dynamic typing response: The first few bits of each chunk of data are reserved for identification purposes. I hope this helps. Most of all I hope that someone replies with an "Well, actually..." response. Those are the best. :) Cheers, --Dave -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
