Python vs .Net

[Laura Creighton]

> "Karsten W. Rohrbach" wrote:
> > 
> > Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, weak-typed, [...] programming
> 
> As Paul said, you misspelled "strong", but also forgot "and dynamically typed
> ".
> 
> (See frequent and by now almost tedious past discussions in this group
> as to why Python is most definitely not a "weakly typed" language.)
> 
> -Peter
> -- 
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

If people around here would remember that the reason we have such
discussions all too often is not that some people are _wrong_,
and believe that Python is what you call a _weakly typed language_,
but rather in their linguistic community 'strongly typed' ==
'statically typed' and 'weakly typed' == 'dynamically typed' things
would be a lot more pleasant.  The confusion is inevitable, because
there are one heck of a lot of computer science text books out there
which teach precisely this.  And, no, it doesn't mean that people
like Karsten W. Rohrbach don't understand the difference between
what Python does, and what Perl does -- but when they want to
discuss this difference, they speak of whether the language does
or does not support 'automatic promotion of types' -- which is
completely independent of whether you have to declare them or not,
and whether you can rebind them on the fly.

Laura Creighton