Strong Vs. Weak Typing

[Jeff Beard]

It is interesting that most comments are biased toward non-commerical
languages and ignore languages which most often 'pay the rent',
eg pascal, cobol, fortran, ...

One comment was made comparing C and Icon, with the possibility of debating
'the commerical aspects' of C.

Part of the Pascal idiom and rationale is in-fact that STRONG typing at
compile time leads to fewer runtime errors, which errors due to type conflicts
are often difficult to debug. This feature of Pascal is/was a direct fall-out
of research in the area of programmers productivity and program correctness.

This does impact OOP and systems/languages that allow polymorphic behavior.
The desirability of polymorphic systems is akin to the DBMS issue of
normalizing relational data ... the answer being dependent upon the needs
of the user.
--
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Opinions are the possession of the speaker and to assert otherwise is plagiarism.
Jeff Beard, Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
e-mail ...!amdahl!sun!quintus!jbeard phone (415) 965-7700

[lawrence.g.mayka]

In article <13...@quintus.UUCP> jbe...@quintus.UUCP () writes:
>Part of the Pascal idiom and rationale is in-fact that STRONG typing at
>compile time leads to fewer runtime errors, which errors due to type conflicts
>are often difficult to debug. This feature of Pascal is/was a direct fall-out
>of research in the area of programmers productivity and program correctness.

But such research, as far as I've seen, has always been a
comparison between strong compile-time typing, as in Pascal, and
weaker compile-time typing, as in C; or no compile-time typing at
all, as in assembly language. The posted question was whether
anyone has any solid evidence of the claimed superiority of
compile-time typing over RUN-time typing, as in Common Lisp.

Lawrence G. Mayka
AT&T Bell Laboratories
l...@ihlpf.att.com

Standard disclaimer.