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From: hoelzle@neon.Stanford.EDU (Urs Hoelzle)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: The search for heterogeneous lists is still on!
Message-ID: <1991Apr3.013413.8428@neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 3 Apr 91 01:34:13 GMT
References: <167:Mar3121:32:0891@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <49591@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Ca , USA
Lines: 30

new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) writes:

>printf's implementation has all the drawbacks of dynamic
>typing that people have pointed out: extra runtime overhead,
>misinterpretation of bits when the expected type doesn't match the
>stated type, and so on.

IMHO, "dynamic typing" is not equivalent to "weak typing" (and "static
typing" isn't the same as "strong typing").  For example, it is
impossible to "misinterpret bits" in Self (a dynamically-typed
language). That is, you'll never have bugs/behavior which cannot
be explained at the language level.

Examples:

Self:  dynamically-typed, strongly-typed
C:     statically-typed, weakly-typed
Ada:   statically-typed, strongly-typed    (as far as I know)

BTW, some languages are between static and dynamic typing; Simula, for
example, has a type-test operator in addition to static typing; if you
use the type qualification operator you may have run-time type errors.

In any case, printf is an example of weak typing, not dynamic typing.

-Urs
-- 
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Urs Hoelzle                                            hoelzle@cs.stanford.EDU
Center for Integrated Systems, CIS 42, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305