Erik de Castro Lopo <mle+s...@mega-nerd.com> writes:
> Daniel Pittman wrote:
>
>> Generally, I think, the strong/weak dichotomy is black and white: either
>> the language allows you to treat arbitrary bytes of memory as two
>> different types, or it doesn't — I can't find any exceptions.
>
> Ocaml has a standard module Marshall with is unsafe and it is also
> possible to do very evil things with the Obj module.
Looking at Marshall, it is a serialization format, which would let you
modify type information in a potentially unsafe way — but no more or
less than writing it to a file and reading it back, I think.
I couldn't get at the site with the documentation, though, so didn't
read up on the Obj module.
> Without those two modules Ocaml is strongly typed. With those two
> modules its less so.
Personally, I would still consider it strongly typed: with Marshall, at
least, you are going through the intermediary of a strongly typed set of
routines and an external representation.
This is like Perl: sure, you can mangle data in a weakly typed fashion,
but only by stepping into a weakly typed language such as C or (un)pack,
embedded in the bigger language.
That is a good example, though.
Regards,
Daniel
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