a what of whats?   (geekin, quote)

Latent type checking gives you much more flexibility in your programming. The way I describe it to C++ programmers is that with latent typing, or Python in general, when you write a function, you get templates without templates. What you're saying in C++ with a template is that you've got code that doesn't care what type it works with. As long as these operations can be performed, then the code is happy. It's actually being evaluated at compile time and spewing out horrible error messages if it fails. But the idea is that the programmer is able to say, "I would like a Bag of Cats." The thing says, OK, as long as I can perform these various operations on Cats that I want to, I don't care if it's Cats or whatever. That's what you get for free with Python without any of that template syntax. It turns out that's incredibly powerful. It makes your programming a lot easier to write and, I think, to read.

 -Bruce Eckel, artima.com interview