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by paddyoloughlin 3532 days ago
Strong vs weak is essentially meaningless.

There is no generally agreed upon definition of what the distinction means.

1 comments

Just because there is some controversy over it doesn't mean it's meaningless. In this case it just means that it's not as descriptive as we would hope, and it's better used to describe as aspect of a language, as they are often strongly typed in some aspects and weakly typed in others.
First, my post said 'essentially meaningless', which is to say 'possibly not completely, but for the most part, meaningless'.

Second, the context here is whether or not the type system of a language is strong or it is weak.

I stand by my assertion that describing type systems as strong or weak typing is essentially meaningless. It's so far from descriptive that all 'strongly typed' ever really means is 'I like this feature' and 'weakly typed' means 'I do not like this feature'.

There are alternative, accurate ways of talking about what people think they are trying to get at when they use the terms strong and weak in relation to languages. They should be used instead.

Bravo! So much hair-splitting and (deliberate?) misinterpretation of context on the internet. We need more counters done your way to keep discussions focused: Factual and to the point.