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From: jbeard@quintus.UUCP (Jeff Beard)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Strong Vs. Weak Typing
Message-ID: <1303@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 8 Jan 90 18:36:08 GMT
Reply-To: jbeard@quintus.UUCP ()
Distribution: usa
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc. Mountain View, CA
Lines: 21

It is interesting that most comments are biased toward non-commerical
languages and ignore languages which most often 'pay the rent', 
eg pascal, cobol, fortran, ...

One comment was made comparing C and Icon, with the possibility of debating
'the commerical aspects' of C.

Part of the Pascal idiom and rationale is in-fact that STRONG typing at
compile time leads to fewer runtime errors, which errors due to type conflicts
are often difficult to debug.  This feature of Pascal is/was a direct fall-out
of research in the area of programmers productivity and program correctness.

This does impact OOP and systems/languages that allow polymorphic behavior.
The desirability of polymorphic systems is akin to the DBMS issue of
normalizing relational data ... the answer being dependent upon the needs
of the user.
-- 
======
Opinions are the possession of the speaker and to assert otherwise is plagiarism.
Jeff Beard, Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
e-mail ...!amdahl!sun!quintus!jbeard 		phone  (415) 965-7700