Comment by dismalaf

1 year ago

Those terms have actual meaning, I've never heard Python or Ruby referred to as untyped. Because they both definitely have types and are in fact strongly typed.

Like, no one would call Ocaml untyped if you used type inference and didn't spell them out yourself... Or if you used the auto keyword everywhere in C++... The Ruby and Python runtimes both definitely enforce types.

> I've never heard Python or Ruby referred to as untyped

Well, now you have! Here are some examples:

https://0xda.de/blog/2024/03/untyped-python-sucks/

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2023/12/1/the-python-that-was/

In fairness I think it is a fairly recent linguistic shift, probably because there's no debate between weakly typed and strongly typed - strongly typed is oblivious the right answer. Instead the debate is between dynamically-typed-without-static-type-annotations and statically-typed-or-dynamically-typed-with-static-type-annotations, but obviously people need a more succinct term for that.

> Like, no one would call Ocaml untyped if you used type inference and didn't spell them out yourself... Or if you used the auto keyword everywhere in C++... The Ruby and Python runtimes both definitely enforce types.

Static type inference still counts as having static types. That's totally different to dynamic typing without static type annotations ("untyped").