Python Strings

Neel Krishnaswami neelk at brick.cswv.com
Thu Sep 7 20:58:54 EDT 2000


Quinn Dunkan <quinn at cruzeiro.ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
> 
> Well, I've never taken a CS class, but my impression was that:
> 
> strongly typed - no typecasts, values' types never change
> weakly typed - typecasts (does this include automatic conversion like 
> perl?)
> 
> statically typed - variable bindings must be known at compile time
> dynamically typed - types are muddled out at runtime
> untyped - there is only one type (strings for tcl, hex for assembly, ...)
>
> So python is strongly dynamically typed.
> C is weakly statically typed.
> haskell is strongly statically typed.
>
> In fact, C is the only language I know of that is weakly typed... is
> this "correct" usage?  It makes sense to me... but I posted this
> because I'm sure someone out there can clear this up for me.
 
There is no 100%-correct usage, since no matter what you choose you
can find a big wheel in the CS universe who has a different set of
conventions, carefully chosen to make his or her pet language look
better. :)

But the usage you've chosen is as close to a standard as there is, and
more importantly is unlikely to confuse anyone when you use it. This
makes it as good a choice as any and better than most.


Neel



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