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

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 2:44 AM, MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
> 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.

REXX treats everything as strings, and has a special type of variable
(the "stem") which can do the jobs that arrays and mappings can.
Booleans are just strings of either "1" or "0". Numbers are strings
containing nothing but decimal digits, an optional decimal point, and
maybe an exponent. Open files are referenced by their file names.
(Which means you can never have a file open for two different jobs at
once. You explicitly close it in between.)

ChrisA