Getting started

[Alex Martelli]

holger krekel wrote:

> Lance wrote:
>> Hi All,
>> 
>> Last night I attended a Weak typing, C++ Templates, and Python talk by
>> Bruce Eckel. It was great, my introduction to Python.
>> 
>> I'm sold on Python and weak typing.
> 
> I am not. But i much prefer dynamic over static typing :-)
> What is 'weak typing' supposed to mean, anyway?  I have heard that a
> couple of times from java-people because they tend to think that python
> is not strongly typed.

$a = "2.3";
$b = 45;
print $a+$b;

emitting 47.3 is pretty close to what I consider "weak typing".  I
find it very hard to produce substantial, large programs using
weakly-typed languages.  Python is strongly, albeit dynamically,
typed, as you say.  Unfortunately, some seminal material of a few
decades ago confused terminology (I vaguely remember something
about it in some early article about Scheme, for example).


Alex