Some corrections [LWN.net]

Some corrections

Posted Nov 6, 2007 10:09 UTC (Tue) by ekj (guest, #1524)
In reply to: Some corrections by flewellyn
Parent article: Daniel Bernstein: ten years of qmail security

"Strongly typed" means that the VALUE'S type is strongly enforced: you can't add a string to an integer, or an integer to a character, without explicit casts, which may not work in any case

Well, that depends, now doesn't it ? If your strongly typed language comes with method overloading there's nothing stopping you from defining several add-functions, like say an "string add(int,string)" method. What, exactly, that'd do would be up to you. In some contexts it could make sense.

In python you can do: mystring = 10 * "-" + "Hello World" + 10 * "-", the very same thing would be perfectly possible in say C++, any language with operator overloading basically, regardless of if the language is statically or dynamically typed.

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Some corrections

Posted Nov 7, 2007 0:16 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (1 responses)

That doesn't really change what I said, actually. While in some languages you can use "+" to mean string concatenation as well as addition, if the language is strongly typed, it will choose which operation to do based on the types of the arguments. And you may need to cast things anyway, such as if you want to concatenate a number's string representation with a string. I've had to do such casts in Python.

Some corrections

Posted Nov 8, 2007 9:24 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]

Sure. You're running completely different functions for int+int and int+string, it just so
happens that the two functions have the same name. They don't need to have anything in common
other than the name.