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From: bvickers@ics.uci.edu (Brett J. Vickers)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: C strongly typed?
Message-ID: <25F6E8B7.16437@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 8 Mar 90 23:20:23 GMT
References: <259@eiffel.UUCP> <1990Mar1.172526.28683@utzoo.uucp> <849@enea.se> <1990Mar7.182230.5517@utzoo.uucp> <25F5AA40.27091@paris.ics.uci.edu> <25695@masscomp.ccur.com>
Reply-To: bvickers@ics.uci.edu (Brett J. Vickers)
Organization: UC Irvine Department of ICS
Lines: 20

ftw@quasar.westford.ccur.com (Farrell Woods) writes:
>>In article <1990Mar7.182230.5517@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>>>                                  C's type system is not extensible unless
>>>you count "struct", but the language is strongly typed -- mixing random
>>>types is not allowed.
>
>Henry's right!  The point is that `char' and `int' (and, `short' and `long')
>all describe *integer* quantities.  It's just that the range os values which
>each of these "types" can hold differs due to the amount of storage allocated
>to a variable of a given type.

If C were as strongly typed a language as Ada is, it would require that
a cast (or conversion) be used before setting two different "types" of integers
equal.  If C were as strongly typed a language as Ada (or Pascal) is, it
would not allow integers to be accessed and stored as char types.

I'm not knocking this flexible typing; I find it extremely useful.

--
bvickers@bonnie.ics.uci.edu