Hi Ben, Thanks for the references, I've also found this post interesting: http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2010/08/what-to-know-before-debating-type-systems.html Cheers Alain
On 2 août 2013, at 06:03, b...@openinworld.com 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. > > 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 >
