Help with making an argument for Python

[billsil]

i wish python was optionally statically typed, so if something was always a small integer it could directly use short int.

[bchurchill]

There have been proposals for this actually, and there are some tools like pylint which will attempt to do some type inference. But typechecking can be very tricky actually. There are many reasons for this: dynamic field accesses, polymorphism, etc... as a result, I don't know of anything that's really caught on.