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Subject: Re: Python is DOOMED! Again!
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2015 13:23:48 -0500
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:84833

On Thu, Jan 29, 2015, at 10:56, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Bar language, on the other hand, tries extremely hard to ensure that
> every
> type is automatically able to be coerced into every other type. The
> coercion might not do what you expect, but it will do *something*:

See, this is where the concept falls apart. Many people will define a
dynamically-typed language as weakly-typed *only if* the result of the
automatic type coercion is unexpected/distasteful/fattening, even if it
is well-defined and predictable according to the rules of the language.
Which makes it a matter of personal taste.

> Bar will never give you a TypeError. I think we can agree that Bar is a
> *very weakly typed* language.

Statically typed lanugages by definition can never give you a TypeError
- there are no runtime conversions that can succeed or fail based on the
type of the arguments. What makes a statically typed language strong or
weak? Are statically typed languages always weak?

> 
> There are degrees of strength, and I think that Python comes closer to
> the
> Foo end than the Bar end. There are few automatic coercions, and most of
> those are in the numeric tower according to the usual mathematical rules.

Why is converting an int to a float when passed to a math function
better than converting any object to a string when passed to a string
function?