Hm, I made a lie. That isn't the point I was trying to make. Or rather, I made two points at once originally, and the second one contradicted the first one :)
(I stated that strong vs weak is dumb, and then I said Python was weakly typed. I meant to say "in the sense that Agda is strong", but I guess I screwed that one up)
*sigh*.
It's perfectly possible to say that Python is strongly typed, with a self-consistent definition of "strongly typed". It's also possible to say that it's weakly typed, with another self-consistent definition. There is no _standard_ definition. The definition that Agda uses is not the definition that Python uses.
I think people tend to choose the one that is least likely to call their favorite language "weak".
Devin
On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 8:41 PM, Devin Jeanpierre jeanpierreda@gmail.com wrote:
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.
The list of "strongly typed" languages is prefixed with the following warning:
Note that some of these definitions are contradictory, others are merely orthogonal, and still others are special cases (with additional constraints) of other, more "liberal" (less strong) definitions. Because of the wide divergence among these definitions, it is possible to defend claims about most programming languages that they are either strongly or weakly typed.
That is the point I was trying to make.
-- Devin
On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 7:59 PM, Terry Reedy tjreedy@udel.edu wrote:
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
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