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From: Richie Bielak <richieb@calfp.com>
Subject: Re: Static vs. Dynamic typing again (was Re: OO, C++, and something much better!)
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Eric Clayberg wrote:
 
[...]

> Most "message
> not understood" errors are caused by messages being sent to nil (e.g.,
> an uninitialized variable or a prematurely freed variable). Furthermore,
> the static type checker would not be able to detect errors that were
> caused by dynamic message creation and dispatch (e.g., the message
> selector is constructed dynamically based on runtime data).
> 

OK. Sending a message to nil is not what I think of as a typing error
and of course a static type checker would not catch that.

There seems to be a cultural gap between the static-typing and 
dynamic-typing crowds. I was raised on statically typed languages
and feel lost in a dynamically typed language (I fiddled little
with Smalltalk and now I'm playing with Python). I mean, I read the
code and can't tell what type a variable is...

On the other hand, I have seen people used to other languages
bang the keyboard and curse the Pascal compiler for not letting
them do something that seemed obviously correct. 

No easy answers.

...richie

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