Static Type Errors

The division between statically and dynamically typed languages has exisited for many years, and we have always had languages of both flavors. Advocates for statically typed languages claim that static typing permits type errors to be caught at compile time. For example, here we are trying to assign a character value to a real number.

Advocates for dynamic languages agree, but claim that such errors are rare, easily caught, and are not the most serious type of errors. They would claim that the burden of static typing, on the programmers time and on the loss of flexibility in a language, is simply too great.

[audio] [real] Text to accompany slide4, in Chapter 10 of An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming