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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhuxl!houxm!ihnp4!cbosgd!mark
From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Anti-CLU... Anti-Strong-Typing...
Message-ID: <666@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 1-Dec-83 14:13:24 EST
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.666
Posted: Thu Dec  1 14:13:24 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 4-Dec-83 02:28:47 EST
References: <411@dartvax.UUCP>, <816@vax2.fluke.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus
Lines: 19

> The problem with so-called "strongly typed" languages like Pascal is
> that the typing is all wrong.  They try to type identifiers.  There are
> situations where this is reasonable, but, in most cases, type
> information should be attached to the value, not the identifier.

> Languages like Smalltalk and Snobol4, therefore, have true strong
> typing.  Languages like Pascal have an apology for type checking (when
> are we going to stop perpetuating the myth that they have strong
> typing?).  Languages like Ada are an abomination, and are best forgotten...

You apparently have a different notion of "strong typing" than I do.
Normally, strong typing tries to catch your errors and point them out
to you, by compile time checks.  What Snobol4 does is quite different:
it checks types at runtime and tries to figure out something reasonable
to do given the types.  While this is certainly more likely to lead to
reasonable results than the C/Fortran/Assembly approach of passing the
wrong type and getting garbage, it tends to let errors remain in the
code undetected, with lots of superflous conversions going on at runtime.
PL/1 and APL are like this too.