From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2008-02-22T16:16:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby type-safe? Ruby strongly/weakly typed? Ruby pitfalls?

Hi,

In message "Re: Ruby type-safe? Ruby strongly/weakly typed? Ruby pitfalls?"
    on Fri, 22 Feb 2008 11:25:01 +0900, "Rule.rule" <rule.rule.rule@gmail.com> writes:

|But re strongly, yes, I have seen this claim in several places
|(including from Matz).
|As I pointed out on wiki, though, it seems to depend on what
|definition one refers to.
|It seems to me, Matz is using Defs #3 and/or #6 in the list I gave
|there:
|     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28programming_language%29

Yes, I admit I use definition #3 and #6 of strong typing.

|But Ruby immediately clashes with my own "intuitive concept" of
|"strongly typed",
|when you can do things like:
|  x = 2; x = "a"
|without getting an error,
|and you also have untyped lists/arrays, etc, in the language.
|
|Looks too much like Perl or something, to me :)

It seems that definition #3 and #6 are the only right definitions for
me, when we have the term "static typing" for your "intuitive
concept".  I am not going to deny your intuitiveness, however.

At least, the Wikipedia entry for Ruby is not the right place to
describe the definition of type-safety and strong typing, since same
thing happens on language with similar type concept, like Python,
Lisp, or Smalltalk.  They should have their own entries if they didn't
have yet.

							matz.