For social contact, I'm generally following people on https://fosstodon.org/home. I'm https://fosstodon.org/@slott56.
Or @slott56@fosstodon.org <https://fosstodon.org/@slott56> as they say in the Fediverse.
But I saw some stuff on Twitter that was disheartening.
I thought Python🐍wasn't strongly typed.🤔 But this code seems to be casting input into an int?
✅guess = int(input("Pick a number: "))
The ugliness of all the round brackets aside, why does this need to be cast into an int?
Oh dear.
- Python is strongly typed. Variables don't have a type associated with them, so we say that variable types are dynamic. Object types are essentially immutable.
- It's not a "cast". It's a conversion. You can't cast objects to another type in Python. Types are essentially immutable.
- The "cast to an int" is really "converted to an int" and that's required because the string value from the input() is likely useless later.
Without more code, it's hard to know why the conversion is required. I'm willing to guess there's comparisons against integers elsewhere, and therefore, this conversion from string to int will make those later comparisons work.
Some of the responses to the tweet were a bit off. I have the urge to enumerate the problems, but that's likely to be unhelpful.
(I say types are essentially immutable because I have a vague feeling that it's possible to around some of the dunder attributes for some kinds of classes and change the association between object and creating class. I have not investigated this because the horror of casting in C, C++, Java, etc., is so emotionally scarring that I can't even.)