Talk:Strong typing

Visual Basic Literal

• Visual BASIC is a hybrid language. In addition to including statically typed variables, it includes a "Variant" data type that can store data of any type. Its implicit casts are fairly liberal where, for example, one can sum string variants and pass the result into an integer literal.

What is the meaning of the phrase 'integer literal' here? I have always understood the term to mean an integer that is in decimal form in the source code, i.e. in the code:'int x = 5' - '5' is an integer literal. In this context, the above quote doesn't make sense, as there can obviously be no assignment into an integer literal. I would correct it, but I have no idea what is trying to be said there, and I'm not familiar enough with VB.

Typing doesn't refer to keying

Perhaps it should be noted somehow that the term 'Typing' refers to data types, not keyboard typing. It took me a couple paragraphs before I realized this.. 24.136.120.12

Introduction

Recently there was a change to the article that was described as "Better introduction". While I would be happy to see a better introduction to this article, I think that the introduction that was inserted wasn't better.

The substantive addition of the new introduction was the statement that:

In computer science, a strongly-typed programming language is one that is not weakly-typed.

This is an inane truism. The linked article weakly-typed programming language added nothing useful; it was a link back to this one. I have replaced it with a redirect.

The introduction that the article has now suggests that Strongly-typed language has no generally agreed-upon meaning:

the phrase strongly-typed, when applied to a programming language, may have one of several incompatible meanings, depending on context.

-- Dominus 14:21, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)