Harish, I [shall carefully reply to] you because I had [searched my mail and found] that you were a serious man, to be treated with respect. But I must say no to you and let me give you my reasons. It's true I have a lot of friends in [software], but they wouldn't be so friendly if they knew my business was [pontificating] instead of [flaming] which they consider a harmless vice. But [pontification], that's a dirty business.
On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 7:49 PM, Harish Mallipeddi <harish.mallipe...@gmail.com> wrote: > Going by the popular definition of weak/strong typing, what has weak typing > in C/C++ anything to do with buffer overflow errors? Javascript is weakly > typed but you don't have buffer overflow problems there. > Hmm... this is going to get tricky, since everyone seems to have different opinions on what these terms mean. I'm very confused about JavaScript. Why do you say it's weakly typed? I did a quick web search on this, and most people seem to agree with you, based on the fact that in JavaScript: >>> "hello" + 10 "hello10" >>> 10 + "hello" "10hello" So everything can be, uh, "promoted" to a String. But can I, say, take an Object and treat it as a number? Or an Array as a String? Or is JavaScript weak in certain directions and strong in others? Maybe you should let on what you mean by strong/weak typing. What I meant by saying that weak typing in C/C++ causes buffer overruns is that everything is just a memory location, since you can arbitrarily switch between pointers and types, which means that you can't have sanity checks for array accesses (which are your buffer overruns) without changing the language itself. > I would assume that people are arguing for strong typing for >> efficiency. A language with run time dynamic dispatch, like say >> Python, will always be slower than something which is statically >> typed. >> >> > Again why would strong typing get you efficiency? > Am I comparing apples and potatoes, if I am please do let me know. I say that run time dynamic dispatch is slow because you always need to look things up, specially in python since you can arbitrarily change anything at runtime, on the other hand, if you have a strongly typed language (thanks for catching that) then you know at compile time what you want your code to do, hence you don't have to find that out at runtime, time saved doing that makes your language faster all other things being equal. I could be horribly wrong, I don't know enough about programming languages to be sure. So please do let me know if you think so. How about this, lets make it less controversial and bring the talk back to safer ground: the best Python code will always be slower than high quality C++ code no matter how good the Python optimizers get. Speed might not be always important and yada-yada-yada, that's irrelevant to the last statement. I write more Python than C++, so yeah, I've heard of most of those reasons. Roshan _______________________________________________ BangPypers mailing list BangPypers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
