weak versus dynamic, definitional origins

Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz gradha at titanium.sabren.com
Fri May 16 03:52:51 EDT 2003


On 2003-05-16, Courageous <jkraska at san.rr.com> wrote:
> I know, however, that we in the dynamic language community consider
> C to be "weakly and statically" typed, and python to be "strongly
> and dynamically typed." I even know just what that means.

I'm not sure about python being strongly and dynamically typed. The
`strongly' part of the sentence doesn't make sense to me. In Python
you don't do variable assignment, you do name binding, which means
the life of a name doesn't need to be the same as the life of the
object, one of the reasons newcomers don't really understand how
the __del__ method of objects is not called immediately.

Whith this scenario there is no strong or weak typing, because
there is no typing at all. The variable name doesn't have type,
it can be pointing now at a string object and a few cycles later
at an integer object. How could be that strong typing?

I've heard that Objective-Caml is strongly typed and
interpreted. From my point of view that means that they don't do name
binding, they use `real' variables like C. But that's a supposition,
you should check a more trustworthy source of information about that.

-- 
 Please don't send me private copies of your public answers. Thanks.





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