Daniel S. Wilkerson wrote:
> If you call a method in Java, you can see right there which method you are
> calling.
> You can then lexically follow the inheritance tree and find out exactly
> what code really is called, what its signature is, and what it returns.
> Nothing dynamic is involved.
Precisely. That's what it's called "static typing".
> etc. at compile time to be a minimum reqirement of any typing I would
> call strong.
What you are saying is that you consider "static" typiing to be
a minimum requirement for "strong" typing.
That's your preference; but they're really two distinct
concepts.
A language has "strong" typing if it allows only type-safe
expressions. "Type-safe" means that where an operation is
defined to accept an argument of type X, if an argument not
of type X is supplied, the expression is "rejected".
Withing its own static type system, perl is fairly strong.
When it comes to user types (classes), perl is utterly
weak. I expect that will change in perl6.
--
John Porter
"Anything essential is invisible to the eyes."
