From: Logan Capaldo <logancapaldo@...>
Date: 2006-05-15T08:03:07+09:00
Subject: Re: begining programmer questions


On May 14, 2006, at 6:49 PM, Michael Gorsuch wrote:

> Corey -
>
> A strongly type language would insist that you declare everything  
> before
> use.
>

Ruby is strongly typed, it's not statically typed. C has weaker types  
than ruby (Oh look, I just cast an int to a pointer). A statically  
typed language would insist you declare the types of everything  
before use. That is unless you have type inference.

e.g. at an ocaml prompt:
# let f x = x + 1;;
val f : int -> int = <fun>

You'll note I did not declare the type  of  x, nor the return type of  
the function, yet OCaml correctly deduced it. But that's tangential.  
Note also that typing doesn't necessarily determine whether or not  
you need to declare something before use. In both Javascript and Perl  
you can declare variables:

var x;

my $x;


Likewise, while I can't think of any languages that do this, I'm sure  
one could devise a statically typed language with no declarations.