Ask HN: Strong vs. weak typing

2 points

15 years ago

I'm working on a functional programming language and debating the issue of strong vs. weak typing. This is a dynamically typed, interpreted language, so it seems to me that some of the benefits of strong typing (i.e., catching type errors at compile time) are irrelevant.

Currently, for example, ("abc" + 5) will return "abc5", and ([1,2,3] + 4) will return [1,2,3,4]. The necessary conversions are done implicitly.

What I generally hear, however, is that strong typing is preferred. So, I'd like to know: what are some pros/cons of strong and weak typing? Is strong typing always the correct choice?

(For reference, the language I'm working on is Scotch: https://github.com/bendmorris/scotch)

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