From: Joel VanderWerf <joelvanderwerf@...>
Date: 2010-11-13T03:08:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs PHP for the web

On 11/12/2010 08:35 AM, Mike Stephens wrote:
> Robert Klemme wrote in post #960960:
>>
>>
>> There seems to be some disagreement what exactly "strongly" and
>> "weakly" means here.
>
> To me it's pretty straightforward. An object of Class A cannot be
> treated as an object of Class B - the language system detects and
> prevents this. Ruby does not follow this approach. It uses duck typing
> which is the opposite.

What makes this so slippery a question is what "treat as" means.

Does

   a = [1,2,3]
   s = "count = #{a.length}"

mean that a Fixnum is treated as a String? It may look so at first 
glance. But what's really happening is that #to_s is called on the 
Fixnum. So String interpolation is using, as you say, duck typing, to 
convert types. I don't really know whether this counts as "treat as" or not.

IMO, the most clear-cut example of weak typing is this:

$ cat a.c
#include <stdio.h>
main(){
   float x = 1.23;
   printf("%d\n", (int)x);
   printf("%d\n", *(int*)&x);
}

$ gcc a.c
$ ./a.out
1
1067282596

Not even perl is weakly typed, in this sense.