What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language

[David Hopwood]

Rob Thorpe wrote:
> David Hopwood wrote:
> 
>>As far as I can tell, the people who advocate using "typed" and "untyped"
>>in this way are people who just want to be able to discuss all languages in
>>a unified terminological framework, and many of them are specifically not
>>advocates of statically typed languages.
> 
> Its easy to create a reasonable framework. My earlier posts show simple
> ways of looking at it that could be further refined, I'm sure there are
> others who have already done this.
>
> The real objection to this was that latently/dynamically typed
> languages have a place in it.

You seem to very keen to attribute motives to people that are not apparent
from what they have said.

> But some of the advocates of statically
> typed languages wish to lump these languages together with assembly
> language a "untyped" in an attempt to label them as unsafe.

A common term for languages which have defined behaviour at run-time is
"memory safe". For example, "Smalltalk is untyped and memory safe."
That's not too objectionable, is it?

(It is actually more common for statically typed languages to fail to be
memory safe; consider C and C++, for example.)

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood at blueyonder.co.uk>