strong typing?

[Brian Boutel]

"S.D.Mechveliani" wrote:
> 

> I am not a specialist and can mistake and confuse things, but I
> wonder
> whether a notion of a strongly typed language is so
> scientifically important.
> The same is with the `compile-time' and `run-time' separation.
> There is no scientific reason why  all  computations with types and
> type resolution should preceed all computations with non-types.
> Very often the types need to behave like ordinary data.
> Would it be reasonable to avoid as possible the restriction of
> strong typing in language specification?

No scientific reason, but a strong engineering reason. 

The engineering idea is to test a design with all available tools before
building it. That way there will be no disasters that could have been
forseen. The computing equivalent of an engineering disaster is for a
program to get a run-time error or to produce an incorrect result. If
this outcome is acceptable, then the program probably wasn't important
enough to be worth writing in the first place.

--brian