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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