[Spivak]

I was talking about the int being 32 bits and the pointer being 64 bits but go off. If you did a naive codegen of this without type checking where the compiler just said "yes ma'am blindly copying the value to &x" then you would clobber adjacent memory. That's the point I'm making, you rely on the type checker to make the types actually mean things and give you safety guarantees.

It feels stronger is languages where you can't even produce a running program if type checking fails but it's conceptually the same.

[tialaramex]

Python does have strong types, it's just that it's dynamically typed - the variables don't have assigned types in Python itself (hence type annotations and third party type checking). C claims to have strong types but it is weakly checked and full of unwise coercions - however it is statically typed and so variables have types.

If you want to see a language which does not have types you want the predecessor of C, B.

Imagining into existence a variant of C where assignment causes arbitrary memory overwrites isn't about type checking, that's not a "naive codegen" it's nonsense. If that was your point then you didn't do a good job of communicating it and it's still wrong.

[Pay08]

Where does C claim to have strong typing?

[tialaramex]

The quote about C being "strongly typed but weakly checked" is usually attributed to Dennis, one of C's co-creators. I am not able to pin it down to a recorded interview or written document but if you've used C you'll undoubtedly recognise the idea.