On Mon, Dec 31, 2001 at 09:27:36PM -0500, William T Wilson wrote:
| Casting you can't really get away from nor do you really need to. In fact
| the more strongly typed the language is, the more casting you have to do.
This statement is incorrect. The strength and staticness of typing
are two independent properties. There are strongly statically typed
languages, weakly statically typed languages, strongly dynamically
typed languages, and weakly dynamically typed languages. Casting only
exists in statically typed langauges (such as C, C++ and Java) and does
not exist in dynamically typed languages (such as Python and Haskell).
However C is farily weakly typed, and C++ is only moderately strongly
typed. Python and haskell, OTOH, are strongly typed. You can never
consider an object (collection of bits) as something that it is not,
which is what casting in C and C++ allows you to do. The reason I
like python so much is that the dynamic typing creates a lot of
flexibility that C, C++ and Java lack, but it doesn't create the type
errors that those languages are prone to. I've heard that haskell has
an even better type system, but I haven't had time to learn it yet.
-D
--
Stay away from a foolish man,
for you will not find knowledge on his lips.
Proverbs 14:7
