I came across this article by Peter Norvig:
Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages
(Peter Norvig is Director of Search at Google and a highly accomplished computer scientist.)
Haven't read the article fully yet, but scanned it a bit, and one line in particular interested me:
"A variable can have a type as a value"
That line is on the page with the heading: "First-Class Dynamic Types"
So I thought of checking this in Python - that section of the article seems to be about Lisp and Dylan (the programming language)).
Here's some code I used to check whether Python variables can have types as values - I typed it in the Python interpreter, so both the input and the output appear below:
>>> a = int >>> type(a) <type 'type'> >>> print a('3') + 4 7 >>> b = str >>> print b(12) * 5 1212121212 >>> class Foo: ... def bar(self): ... print "in Foo.bar()" ... >>> f = Foo >>> f().bar() in Foo.bar() >>>And here's a couple more lines which give a clue why the above works:
>>> id(int) 505548800 >>> id(a) 505548800 >>> id(str) 505571224 >>> id(b) 505571224Note that the names int and str have valid id()s, and that id(a) == id(int), and id(b) == id(str).
So it seems that variables in Python can have values that are types. Of course, the id() stuff I did above indicates that it will work for all Python types if it works for one, since "a = int" binds the name a to the same object that the (built-in) name int is bound to. That's my guess, anyway. Interested to see if anyone has any different ideas or a better explanation.
And speaking of Peter Norvig, here's another article by him about Albert Einstein:
'05 Annual Performance Review: Albert Einstein
- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises
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2 comments:
Oops, that was a typo. In the line:
Peter Norvig is Director of Search at Google
It should actually be Director of Research. (He was earlier Director of Search Quality.)
Maybe it's an appropriate typo, though; just add the re :-)
thanks
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