greetings all,
I'm in the final weeks of writing up my Masters dissertation and seeking
some scholarly references to Smalltalk being "Strongly Typed."
I my review of Smalltalk I was surprised to find that [1] describes
Smalltalk as Strongly Typed, since Smalltalk is sometimes denigrated as
being untyped / weakly typed.
From reviewing discussion forums this now makes sense, but I can only
find one of scholarly reference that briefly mentions this [2]. The
most enlightening is [3] which defines Type Strength as:
"A strongly typed language prevents any operation on the wrong type of
data. In weakly typed languages there are ways to escape this
restriction: type conversions"
meaning that getting a MNU is a form of Strong Typing since you can't
make a Smalltalk object run a method that is not its own. The problem
appears to be that Strong Typing has been synonymous with Static Typing
for a long time, and Static Typing strongly ties types to variables,
except in Dynamically Typed languages, I think types can be considered
independently from variables, in which case the definition of [3] has
some merit, hence Smalltalk is Strongly Typed.
Sounds controversial, so I'm just hoping for some peer reviewed backup -
but only you have something easily to hand. This is just a small thing I
can just leave out if necessary.
cheers -ben
[1] http://www.squeak.org/Features/
[2] p15,
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.35.7507&rep=rep1&type=pdf
[3] http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/publicaties/rapporten/cw/CW415.pdf
