[crazygringo]

> I’m actually stunned that you think to use this as an example when I think I’d fire any programmer that did that in my team for gross negligence.

You seem to be having a different conversation than I am.

I'm just describing Python as it is. I'm not defending it. I know why you can add True to a number, or else I wouldn't have come up with the example. And I know perfectly well that r-strings are just strings. Python easily could have made them a distinct object, to force people from ever making backslash errors, and restricted Regex functions to them, but didn't.

My only point has been, "Pythonic" things tend to be pretty liberal in what they accept. Type hints aren't even enforced, when they exist at all. You seem to think it shouldn't be that way. Great! But regardless, claiming it's not that way -- that Python is somehow this strict language -- is just mischaracterizing it.

[scott_w]

> My only point has been, "Pythonic" things tend to be pretty liberal in what they accept

Being able to use a string as a string and an int as an int are not “pretty liberal in what they accept,” it’s just programming language theory 101! I think you’re mistaking duck typing for “liberal acceptance,” which are not the same thing. There’s always been an expectation that you should use compatible interfaces, even within the standard library. I’ve been bitten enough times by passing a generator in when a function expects a list, for example.

[crazygringo]

I'm not mistaking it at all. Yes, duck typing is very much liberal acceptance, but Python code tends to go much farther. I could give a million examples -- like how in Python's isinstance() the second argument can be a type or a tuple of types, or in sqlite3 that you can run queries on a connection or on a cursor, and don't even get me started on Matplotlib or Numpy. It's just idiomatic in Python to make things easy for the programmer by accepting multiple types when possible. If you don't recognize this as the common Python pattern, I literally don't know what else to tell you.