"Bill Page" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: | On November 20, 2005 2:47 PM Gabriel Dos Reis wrote: | > | > "Bill Page" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: | > [...] | > | I wonder if your colleague who said: "strong typing is for the | > | weak of minds" really knows what "types" in computer programming | > | really are? | > | > well, if Pascal has a strong type system, then I can't see how I | > can disagree :-/ | > | | Perhaps you said this only as humour? But I am curious since it is | not clear to me who you are not disagreeing with ... ?
Partly as humour, and partly seriously. I don't think strong typing is a goal in itself; I have had lot of experience with good type systems helping me catching silly errors early in program development, and alleged "strong type systems" getting in my way. | Pascal was the first strongly typed language that I learned. I wrote I started with BASIC and Pascal was my second programming language, the more serious I programmed with (and I did not have much choice given the French educational system at the time). | what I thought was a fairly substantial medical application in UCSD | Pascal on an Apple II microcomputer. I believe that the type system | really did contribute to more reliable software development. From a | historical perspective it is interesting to speculate why Pascal did | not survive. I'm not sure we have much to speculate about, given the facts. I can only speak for myself and I would refrain from generalization; but Pascal's "strong type system" did not help me. I got far more positive experience later with (O)Caml and C++ (and even Scheme!). I don't believe it is a matter of dynamism vs. non-dynamism. For me, it is a matter of what I can express and how I can express it. | I think perhaps it was because in the end it's type | system was not quite flexible enough (compared say to Haskell). As a | result C, with almost not type system dominated (and still dominates) | most application development. C has a type system -- serious C programmers know how to use it. Yes, it does not get anal-retentive about it where it should. And that is a pity. Notice that Pascal and C started almost at the same time... -- Gaby _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer