Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!ames!ucbcad!faustus From: faustus@ucbcad.berkeley.edu (Wayne A. Christopher) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Check the Arg Count Message-ID: <1213@ucbcad.berkeley.edu> Date: Sat, 10-Jan-87 20:36:28 EST Article-I.D.: ucbcad.1213 Posted: Sat Jan 10 20:36:28 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 11-Jan-87 00:35:32 EST References: <3226@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <1635@enea.UUCP> <5020@clyde.ATT.COM> Organization: CAD Group, U.C. Berkeley Lines: 14 Be careful when you use terms like "high level" and "strong typing". Just because a language is called by some people "strongly typed" by some people doesn't mean much. Pure Pascal, which doesn't even let you write a function to manipulate strings without knowing their lengths, is strongly typed by some definitions (and a good example of why by those definitions strong typing is a bad thing), but is not strongly typed by other definitions because you can convert values from one type to another with unions. Sure, argument checking is good, but if you take the philosophy a bit further and eliminate anything like casts you have made the language useless. You have to be able to protect the user against inadvertent errors without preventing him from doing just about anything he wants when he really wants to... Wayne