alex goldman wrote: > John W. Kennedy wrote: > > >>Strong >>typing has been a feature of mainstream programming languages since the >>late 1950's. > > > I'm just curious, what do you mean by /strong/ typing, and which strongly > typed languages do you know?
Unfortunately, I have seen the meaning shift with the context. In Ada '83, it means it is not possible to have the equivalent of a C unprototyped function, and that mixed-type expressions tend to need explicit casting. In other contexts (as here), I've seen it used to mean simply that variables have definite types, and it is not possible (except by the use of polymorphic classes) for a variable to change from an integer to a float to a character string in the course of execution. In this sense, compile-to-machine-code languages (ee.g., Fortran, COBOL, C, C++, or Pascal), are generally strongly typed and interpreted languages (ee.g., shell scripts, Perl, REXX, APL, or LISP) are generally not. (In pure OO languages, such as SmallTalk or Ruby, the distinction may not really apply, since all variables are of the single type reference-to-root-class.) -- John W. Kennedy "The bright critics assembled in this volume will doubtless show, in their sophisticated and ingenious new ways, that, just as /Pooh/ is suffused with humanism, our humanism itself, at this late date, has become full of /Pooh./" -- Frederick Crews. "Postmodern Pooh", Preface -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list