What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language

[Andreas Rossberg]

Rob Thorpe wrote:
> 
> Its easy to create a reasonable framework.

Luca Cardelli has given the most convincing one in his seminal tutorial 
"Type Systems", where he identifies "typed" and "safe" as two orthogonal 
dimensions and gives the following matrix:

           | typed | untyped
    -------+-------+----------
    safe   | ML    | Lisp
    unsafe | C     | Assembler

Now, jargon "dynamically typed" is simply untyped safe, while "weakly 
typed" is typed unsafe.

> The real objection to this was that latently/dynamically typed
> languages have a place in it.  But some of the advocates of statically
> typed languages wish to lump these languages together with assembly
> language a "untyped" in an attempt to label them as unsafe.

No, see above. And I would assume that that is how most proponents of 
the typed/untyped dichotomy understand it.

- Andreas