[J3] ballot #38

[William Clodius]

Fortran is a strongly and statically typed language with optional implicit typing. In contrast to Malcolm, I would say that duck typing is a form of dynamic, but strong, typing. Dynamic because the type of a variable can change on the fly, but strong because there are significant limitations on what can be done with a variable given it’s current type. A weakly typed language typically has only one or two types, e.g. many scripting languages rely almost exclusively on strings. Another form of weak typing is a language that treats each variable as an address whose contents are to be interpreted depending on context. I believe that BCPL was weakly typed in the second sense. 

> On Feb 1, 2022, at 11:16 AM, Gary Klimowicz via J3 <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org> wrote:
> 
> On Jan 31, 2022, at 22:04, Malcolm Cohen via J3 <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org> wrote:
>> 
>> > From my experience with other languages with duck typing,
>>  
>> Duck typing is a dynamic typing system that has nothing whatsoever to do with Fortran sequence types. Nothing. It is used in languages that don’t have strong typing; Fortran is a strongly typed language.
>>  
>> Fortran sequence types do not even use structural typing (which is the closest static equivalent to “duck typing”.
> 
> Thank you, Malcolm. I stand corrected.
> 
> Is there a well-known name that corresponds to the Fortran type model? (I'm about to do a literature search for a class I'm taking.)
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Gary
> 
> 
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