On 12/20/2011 7:51 PM, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:
Not exactly true, and unnecessarily combative. More true is that careless use of 'typed' has gotten tiresome. Python is strongly dynamically typed. But people occasionally post -- again the same day you posted to python list -- that Python is weakly typed. I am tired of explaining that 'typed' is not synonymous with 'statically typed'.
I don't find this much less careless. How do you differentiate between the "strong typing" of Python and the "strong typing" of Agda? It isn't a binary quantity.
Perhaps, instead, we should stop claiming things are "strong" or "weak". If I said that, relatively speaking, Python is weakly typed, people would get offended -- not because I made any technically incorrect statement (on the spectrum, Python is far closer to assembly than Agda), but because to call it "weak" is insulting.
If you are going to use term idiosyncratically, then consider giving you definition along with it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongly_typed for a common usage, by which Python is strongly typed. -- Terry Jan Reedy