strong/weak typing and pointers

[Alex Martelli]

Steven Bethard <steven.bethard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On the other hand, I haven't really seen any good
> cases for wanting weak-typing in a statically-typed language either.

How would an operating system's filesystems store arbitrary sequences of
bytes (which might be floats, int, whatever -- only the application
knows) into disk pages (blocks of, say , 4096 bytes each) otherwise?  Or
are you saying that operating systems' kernels should all be implemented
in dynamically-typed languages, or that the structureless filesystem
concept that was the fortune of Unix (and is common today to other OSs,
too), is not "good"?

Even if you design a new OS based on a filesystem whose files are all
"strongly typed" (EEK, but that's another issue), how do you have
interoperate with other boxes, with the whole internet, without the
ability to type-pun ("weak-typing") when necessary...?


Alex