Pascal Costanza wrote: > Chris Smith wrote: > >> Knowing that it'll cause a lot of strenuous objection, I'll >> nevertheless interject my plea not to abuse the word "type" with a >> phrase like "dynamically typed". If anyone considers "untyped" to be >> perjorative, as some people apparently do, then I'll note that another >> common term is "type-free," which is marketing-approved but doesn't >> carry the misleading connotations of "dynamically typed." We are >> quickly losing any rational meaning whatsoever to the word "type," and >> that's quite a shame. > > The words "untyped" or "type-free" only make sense in a purely > statically typed setting. In a dynamically typed setting, they are > meaningless, in the sense that there are _of course_ types that the > runtime system respects. > > Types can be represented at runtime via type tags. You could insist on > using the term "dynamically tagged languages", but this wouldn't change > a lot. Exactly _because_ it doesn't make sense in a statically typed > setting, the term "dynamically typed language" is good enough to > communicate what we are talking about - i.e. not (static) typing.
Oh, but it *does* make sense to talk about dynamic tagging in a statically typed language. That's part of what makes the term "dynamically typed" harmful: it implies a dichotomy between "dynamically typed" and "statically typed" languages, when in fact dynamic tagging and static typing are (mostly) independent features. -- David Hopwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list