On 2 August 2013 06:03, <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. >
There's not much controversy.. C, for instance is weakly typed, since you can say: unsigned int a = 10; int b = a; but at same time, C is statically typed language. So apparently 'strong' is not synonym to 'static'. > 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 > -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.
