What is the difference between a strongly typed language and a statically typed language

Question

Also  does one imply the other

User · Answer

Strong typing probably means that variables have a well-defined type and that there are strict rules about combining variables of different types in expressions. For example, if A is an integer and B is a float, then the strict rule about A+B might be that A is cast to a float and the result returned as a float. If A is an integer and B is a string, then the strict rule might be that A+B is not valid.

Static typing probably means that types are assigned at compile time (or its equivalent for non-compiled languages) and cannot change during program execution.

Note that these classifications are not mutually exclusive, indeed I would expect them to occur together frequently. Many strongly-typed languages are also statically-typed.

And note that when I use the word 'probably' it is because there are no universally accepted definitions of these terms. As you will already have seen from the answers so far.

User · Answer

What is the difference between a strongly typed language and a statically typed language    A statically typed language has a type system that is checked at compile time by the implementation  a compiler or interpreter    The type check rejects some programs  and programs that pass the check usually come with some guarantees  for example  the compiler guarantees not to use integer arithmetic instructions on floating-point numbers   There is no real agreement on what  strongly typed  means  although the most widely used definition in the professional literature is that in a  strongly typed  language  it is not possible for the programmer to work around the restrictions imposed by the type system   This term is almost always used to describe statically typed languages   Static vs dynamic  The opposite of statically typed is  dynamically typed   which means that   Values used at run time are classified into types  There are restrictions on how such values can be used  When those restrictions are violated  the violation is reported as a  dynamic  type error    For example  Lua  a dynamically typed language  has  a string type  a number type  and a Boolean type  among others   In Lua every value belongs to exactly one type  but this is not a requirement for all dynamically typed languages   In Lua  it is permissible to concatenate two strings  but it is not permissible to concatenate a string and a Boolean   Strong vs weak  The opposite of  strongly typed  is  weakly typed   which means you can work around the type system   C is notoriously weakly typed because any pointer type is convertible to any other pointer type simply by casting   Pascal was intended to be strongly typed  but an oversight in the design  untagged variant records  introduced a loophole into the type system  so technically it is weakly typed  Examples of truly strongly typed languages include CLU  Standard ML  and Haskell   Standard ML has in fact undergone several revisions to remove loopholes in the type system that were discovered after the language was widely deployed   What s really going on here   Overall  it turns out to be not that useful to talk about  strong  and  weak    Whether a type system has a loophole is less important than the exact number and nature of the loopholes  how likely they are to come up in practice  and what are the consequences of exploiting a loophole   In practice  it s best to avoid the terms  strong  and  weak  altogether  because   Amateurs often conflate them with  static  and  dynamic   Apparently  weak typing  is used by some persons to talk about the relative prevalance or absence of implicit conversions  Professionals can t agree on exactly what the terms mean  Overall you are unlikely to inform or enlighten your audience    The sad truth is that when it comes to type systems   strong  and  weak  don t have a universally agreed on technical meaning    If you want to discuss the relative strength of type systems  it is better to discuss exactly what guarantees are and are not provided  For example  a good question to ask is this   is every value of a given type  or class  guaranteed to have been created by calling one of that type s constructors    In C the answer is no   In CLU  F   and Haskell it is yes   For C   I am not sure mdash I would like to know    By contrast  static typing means that programs are checked before being executed  and a program might be rejected before it starts   Dynamic typing means that the types of values are checked during execution  and a poorly typed operation might cause the program to halt or otherwise signal an error at run time   A primary reason for static typing is to rule out programs that might have such  dynamic type errors         Does one imply the other    On a pedantic level  no  because the word  strong  doesn t really mean anything   But in practice  people almost always do one of two things    They  incorrectly  use  strong  and  weak  to mean  static  and  dynamic   in which case they  incorrectly  are using  strongly typed  and  statically typed  interchangeably  They use  strong  and  weak  to compare properties of static type systems   It is very rare to hear someone talk about a  strong  or  weak  dynamic type system   Except for FORTH  which doesn t really have any sort of a type system  I can t think of a dynamically typed language where the type system can be subverted   Sort of by definition  those checks are bulit into the execution engine  and every operation gets checked for sanity before being executed      Either way  if a person calls a language  strongly typed   that person is very likely to be talking about a statically typed language

User · Answer

Strongly typed means that there are restrictions between conversions between types  Statically typed means that the types are not dynamic - you can not change the type of a variable once it has been created

User · Answer

Both are poles on two different axis    strongly typed vs  weakly typed statically typed vs  dynamically typed   Strongly typed means  a will not be automatically converted from one type to another  Weakly typed is the opposite  Perl can use a string like  123  in a numeric context  by automatically converting it into the int 123  A strongly typed language like python will not do this   Statically typed means  the compiler figures out the type of each variable at compile time  Dynamically typed languages only figure out the types of variables at runtime

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Answer is already given above  Trying to differentiate between strong vs week and static vs dynamic concept    What is Strongly typed VS Weakly typed   Strongly Typed  Will not be automatically converted from one type to another  In Go or Python like strongly typed languages  2    8 will raise a type error  because they don t allow for  type coercion    Weakly  loosely  Typed  Will be automatically converted to one type to another  Weakly typed languages like JavaScript or Perl won t throw an error and in this case JavaScript will results  28  and perl will result 10   Perl Example   my  a    2    8  print  a   n     Save it to main pl and run perl main pl and you will get output 10   What is Static VS Dynamic type   In programming  programmer define static typing and dynamic typing with respect to the point at which the variable types are checked  Static typed languages are those in which type checking is done at compile-time  whereas dynamic typed languages are those in which type checking is done at run-time    Static  Types checked before run-time Dynamic  Types checked on the fly  during execution   What is this means   In Go it checks typed before run-time  static check   This mean it not only translates and type-checks code it   s executing  but it will scan through all the code and type error would be thrown before the code is even run  For example   package main  import  fmt   func foo a int        if  a  gt  0            fmt Println  I am feeling lucky  maybe           else           fmt Println  2    8           func main         foo 2      Save this file in main go and run it  you will get compilation failed message for this   go run main go   command-line-arguments   main go 9 25  cannot convert  2   type untyped string  to type int   main go 9 25  invalid operation   2    8  mismatched types string and int    But this case is not valid for Python  For example following block of code will execute for first foo 2  call and will fail for second foo 0  call  It s because Python is dynamically typed  it only translates and type-checks code it   s executing on  The else block never executes for foo 2   so  2    8 is never even looked at and for foo 0  call it will try to execute that block and failed   def foo a       if a  gt  0          print  I am feeling lucky       else          print  2    8 foo 2  foo 0    You will see following output  python main py I am feeling lucky  Traceback  most recent call last     File  pyth py   line 7  in  lt module gt      foo 0    File  pyth py   line 5  in foo     print  2    8 TypeError  cannot concatenate  str  and  int  objects

User · Answer

One does not imply the other  For a language to be statically typed it means that the types of all variables are known or inferred at compile time    A strongly typed language does not allow you to use one type as another  C is a weakly typed language and is a good example of what strongly typed languages don t allow  In C you can pass a data element of the wrong type and it will not complain  In strongly typed languages you cannot

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Data Coercion does not necessarily mean weakly typed because sometimes its syntacical sugar   The example above of Java being weakly typed because of  String s    abc    123    Is not weakly typed example because its really doing   String s    abc    new Integer 123  toString     Data coercion is also not weakly typed if you are constructing a new object  Java is a very bad example of weakly typed  and any language that has good reflection will most likely not be weakly typed   Because the runtime of the language always knows what the type is  the exception might be native types    This is unlike C  C is the one of the best examples of weakly typed  The runtime has no idea if 4 bytes is an integer  a struct  a pointer or a 4 characters   The runtime of the language really defines whether or not its weakly typed otherwise its really just opinion   EDIT  After further thought this is not necessarily true as the runtime does not have to have all the types reified in the runtime system to be a Strongly Typed system  Haskell and ML have such complete static analysis that they can potential ommit type information from the runtime

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This is often misunderstood so let me clear it up   Static Dynamic Typing  Static typing is where the type is bound to the variable   Types are checked at compile time   Dynamic typing is where the type is bound to the value   Types are checked at run time   So in Java for example   String s    abcd     s will  forever  be a String  During its life it may point to different Strings  since s is a reference in Java   It may have a null value but it will never refer to an Integer or a List  That s static typing   In PHP    s    abcd                s is a string  s   123                  s is now an integer  s   array 1  2  3        s is now an array  s   new DOMDocument      s is an instance of the DOMDocument class   That s dynamic typing   Strong Weak Typing   Edit alert    Strong typing is a phrase with no widely agreed upon meaning   Most programmers who use this term to mean something other than static typing use it to imply that there is a type discipline that is enforced by the compiler   For example  CLU has a strong type system that does not allow client code to create a value of abstract type except by using the constructors provided by the type   C has a somewhat strong type system  but it can be  subverted  to a degree because a program can always cast a value of one pointer type to a value of another pointer type   So for example  in C you can take a value returned by malloc   and cheerfully cast it to FILE   and the compiler won t try to stop you mdash or even warn you that you are doing anything dodgy    The original answer said something about a value  not changing type at run time    I have known many language designers and compiler writers and have not known one that talked about values changing type at run time  except possibly some very advanced research in type systems  where this is known as the  strong update problem     Weak typing implies that the compiler does not enforce a typing discpline  or perhaps that enforcement can easily be subverted   The original of this answer conflated weak typing with implicit conversion  sometimes also called  implicit promotion    For example  in Java   String s    abc    123      abc123     This is code is an example of implicit promotion  123 is implicitly converted to a string before being concatenated with  abc   It can be argued the Java compiler rewrites that code as   String s    abc    new Integer 123  toString      Consider a classic PHP  starts with  problem   if  strpos  abcdef    abc      false         not found     The error here is that strpos   returns the index of the match  being 0  0 is coerced into boolean false and thus the condition is actually true  The solution is to use     instead of    to avoid implicit conversion   This example illustrates how a combination of implicit conversion and dynamic typing can lead programmers astray   Compare that to Ruby   val    abc    123   which is a runtime error because in Ruby the object 123 is not implicitly converted just because it happens to be passed to a   method  In Ruby the programmer must make the conversion explicit   val    abc    123 to s   Comparing PHP and Ruby is a good illustration here  Both are dynamically typed languages but PHP has lots of implicit conversions and Ruby  perhaps surprisingly if you re unfamiliar with it  doesn t   Static Dynamic vs Strong Weak  The point here is that the static dynamic axis is independent of the strong weak axis  People confuse them probably in part because strong vs weak typing is not only less clearly defined  there is no real consensus on exactly what is meant by strong and weak  For this reason strong weak typing is far more of a shade of grey rather than black or white   So to answer your question  another way to look at this that s mostly correct is to say that static typing is compile-time type safety and strong typing is runtime type safety   The reason for this is that variables in a statically typed language have a type that must be declared and can be checked at compile time  A strongly-typed language has values that have a type at run time  and it s difficult for the programmer to subvert the type system without a dynamic check   But it s important to understand that a language can be Static Strong  Static Weak  Dynamic Strong or Dynamic Weak

[type-safety] What is the difference between a strongly typed language and a statically typed language?

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