From: Dan Sugalski <dan@...>
Date: 2003-10-18T06:04:04+09:00
Subject: Re: OT: Strict typing on large projects

On Sat, 18 Oct 2003, Robert Church wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 18, 2003 at 05:41:03AM +0900, Michael Campbell quipped:
> > "What I would love to see is a 100,000+ lines project written in PHP
> > being mantained by one or two developers. You can't do that without
> > strict typing."
>
> (b) Since this is a ruby list, it's important to note that Ruby *is
> not* weakly typed. It is dynamically typed. C is an examply of a
> weakly typed language, in that, for instance, you can assign a
> character to an integer, and the character data will then be treated
> as an integer value. This cannot happen in Ruby.

This isn't why C is a weakly typed language. (C doesn't, strictly
speaking, have a character type -- chars are just very small integers)
Neither is autoconversion (such as what perl does when you use a string as
an integer, which C doesn't do) why a language is weakly typed

C is a weakly typed language because, with casts, you can make the
compiler treat any memory location as any type you'd care to.

					Dan