What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language

[Rob Thorpe]

Dr.Ruud wrote:
> Marshall schreef:
>
> > "dynamic types." I don't have a firm definition for
> > that term, but my working model is runtime type tags. In which
> > case, I would say that among statically typed languages,
> > Java does have dynamic types, but C does not. C++ is
> > somewhere in the middle.
>
> C has union.

That's not the same thing.  The value of a union in C can be any of a
set of specified types.  But the program cannot find out which, and the
language doesn't know either.

With C++ and Java dynamic types the program can test to find the type.