"Paul Boddie" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> One classic example of a
> weakly-typed language is BCPL, apparently, but hardly anyone has any
> familiarity with it any more.
Actually, BCPL is what Stevenn D'Aprano called "untyped". Except his
definition is suitable for after everyone followed IBM's footsteps in
building general-purpose byte-addressable machines.
In BCPL, everything is a word. Given a word, you can dereference it,
add it to another word (as either a floating point value or an integer
value), or call it as a function.
A classic example of a weakly-typed language would be a grandchild of
BCPL, v6 C. Since then, C has gotten steadily more strongly typed. A
standard complaint as people tried to move code from a v6 C compiler
(even the photo7 compiler) to the v7 compiler was "What do you mean I
can't ....". Of course, hardly anyone has familiarity with that any
more, either.
<mike
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