What's the best way to minimize the need of run time checks?

[MRAB]

On 2016-08-14 15:29, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
[snip]
> I don't know many untyped languages apart from machine code or maybe
> assembly. Perhaps Forth? (Maybe not -- some Forths include a separate
> floating point stack as well as the usual stack.) Hypertalk treated
> everything as strings. Tcl treats nearly everything as strings, although it
> also has arrays.
>
[snip]

BCPL (ancestor of C) had a single data type, the bit-pattern.