this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Yes the compiler/interpreter can figure it out on the fly, that's what we mean by untyped languages. And as stated both have their merits and their faults.
Elon doesn't know what the words mean and just chimes in with his AI future BS.
Yes! Just because a compiler could guess the type doesn't mean it should. Elon didn't understand the meme at all.
why would you not want it to? what circumstance, other than an integer not given an explicit type, could it guess wrong?
Dynamic vs Static is a huge debate that I'm not qualified to answer. My personal preference is static because I like to know my mistakes at compile time instead of after running and something weird happens. That goes along with my preference that all variables should be declared at the top of a function.
https://hackernoon.com/i-finally-understand-static-vs-dynamic-typing-and-you-will-too-ad0c2bd0acc7
I almost upvoted but for that last sentence. Code block scopes are most intuitive, and JavaScript has become a better language since it gained them.
Yeah I use it too. But when I have to read somebody's code or my own from a while ago, I prefer everything labeled at the top. That way I can read the top, jump anywhere, and know what is going on without looking at any other lines.
It's a preference that can be argued like dynamic typing.
I guess you could make a rule of declaring your variables at the top of their scope, be it a class, a function or a code block. That would give clarity without needlessly expanding any scopes.
I'm not talking about dynamic vs static though. I'm talking about static typing with or without compiler type inference a la Rust or C++'s
auto(note that Java making generic parameters optional does not count since that is, in fact, dynamic typing)
I also prefer static typing but I like it when it is implemented like kotlin where type inference is still great, I think dart also works like that
Well, if there is nof fixed (explicit or implicit) type it's imposible for the compiler to optimise your code. Also imho programming with typed languages is way easier because your IDE can recognize function argumentd before you compile/run. I tried python and found it baffling how anyone can get any work done with it :D
I used Python almost exclusively before I learned Rust and inevitably became a full time Rust bro, and the answer is "slowly and with a lot of crashes" :P
anyway, as I said in another comment, I'm not talking about static vs dynamic typing, I'm talking about static typing with vs without a compiler that can do type inference. C++'s auto will default to floats if you don't tell it the type of a number which is pretty brain dead, and there are scenarios where it's helpful to write out a type that could be inferred for readability/guaranteed correctness's sake, but apart from that I can't think why having most of your types be implicit would be bad
Are there untyped languages? You probably meant 'dynamically typed languages'.
But even statically typed languages can figure out most types for you from the context - it's called 'type inference'.
Most of my code is untyped. First I type it, then I realize it's all wrong and use backspace to untype it.
This is the dumbest thing I've read all week. Congrats. Lol
Assembly probably? So low level you kinda just play with bits. That's all I can think of for an untyped language. Everything else I'm aware of is dynamically or statically typed
I kind of feel like "untyped" is a term that doesn't really have a proper definition right now. As far as I can tell when people say "untyped" they usually mean it as a synonym for whatever they consider "dynamically typed" to mean (which also seems to vary a bit from person to person, haha). Sometimes people say assembly is untyped exactly for this reason, but you could also consider it to have one type "bits" and all of the operations just do things on bits (although, arguably different sized registers have different types). Similarly, people sometimes consider "dynamically typed languages" to just be "unityped" (maybe monotyped is more easily distinguished from untyped, haha) languages at their core, and if you squint you can just think of the dynamic type checks as a kind of pattern matching on a giant sum type.
In some sense values always have types because you could always classify them into types externally, and you could even consider a value to be a member of multiple types (often programming languages with type systems don't allow this and force unique types for every value). Because you could always classify values under a type it feels kind of weird to refer to languages as being "untyped", but it's also kind of weird to refer to a language as "typed" when there isn't really any meaningful typing information and there's no type system checking the "types" of values. Types sort of always exist, but also sort of only exist when you actually make the distinctions and have something that you call a "type system"... In some sense the distinction between static and dynamic typing is sort of an arbitrary implementation detail too (though, of course, it has impacts on the experience of programming, and the language design makes a bit of a difference in terms of what's decidable :) (and obviously the type system can determine what programs you consider to be "valid")... But you can absolutely have a mix of static type checking and dynamic typing, for instance... It's all a little more wishy washy than people tend to think in my opinion).
Well like asembly has "int types" and "float types" as there's specific instructions for those operations but those instructions don't actually care if the bits are for a float or an int. Types in a language are used to restrict the valid operations. In a statically typed language you cannot call
cat.bark()ordog.meow()because the property's of the type, what things you can do with it are known before the program runs. In a dynamically typed language such as Pythoncat.bark()might or might not be valid so it has to check at runtime for a method throwing an error if it doesn't exist.Static/Dynamic typing is a difference of when. Java has static typing but you can also just pass raw Objects around and cast when needed. It even throws a runtime exception similar to how Python or JavaScript would fail. However Java is of course ultimately statically typed everything just shares a common parent class and has types at runtime which allows for some some psudo dynamic behavior
There’s operations that treat bits like floats and operations that treat them like various kinds of ints, but the meaning of bits is in the eye of the beholder. There’s even good examples of mixing and matching integer and floating point operations to clever effect, like with the infamous fast inverse square root. I feel like people often think mathematical objects mean something beyond what they are, when often math is kind of just math and it is what it is (if that makes sense… it’s kind of like anthropomorphizing mathematical objects and viewing them through a specific lens, as opposed to just seeing them as the set of axioms that they are). That’s kind of how I feel with this stuff. You can treat the bits however you want and it’s not like integer operations and bitwise operations have no meaning on supposedly floating point values, they do something (and mixing these different types of operations can even do useful things!), it just might not be the normal arithmetic operations you expect when you interpret the number as a float (and enjoy your accidental NaNs or whatever :P).
The difference of static and dynamic typing being when you perform the type checking is partially why I consider it to be a somewhat arbitrary distinction for a language (obviously decidable static type checking is limited, though), and projects like typescript have shown that you can successfully bolt on a static type system onto a dynamic language to provide type checking on specific parts of a program just fine. But obviously this changes what you consider to be a valid program at compile time, though maybe not what you consider to be a valid program overall if you consider programs with dynamic type errors to be invalid too (which there’s certainly precedence for… C programs are arguably only real C programs when they’re well-defined, but detecting UB is undecidable).
I guess "untyped" could mean "weakly typed", like how shell and DOS batch are, where everything is a string until you say "hey I want to do math on this" at which point the interpreter turns it into a number, does math on the number, and then turns it back into a string before saving it back to the variable
assembly
VBA you can declare everything as variant.
Is that untyped?
Most statically typed languages can't because they don't implement Hindley-Milner type inference.
Well that would depend on the definition and what you exactly mean by untyped.
The untyped part is usually referring to the way the programmer interacts with the language, for example not setting a type for variables and parameters. But then there is the question of is the programmer ever allowed to explicitly set the type. And further more, if the programmer explicitly set the type, does this mean the type can't change at a later point? And another question could be, can the programmer check or enforce what type a variable or parameter is? And the question, if there is only one type of data in the language, would that be a typed or untyped language? But I would consider these to be details and all fall under the untyped umbrella, with untyped just meaning not-typed.
Then there's the question of the technical implementation of the language. Defining a language is one thing, actually having it run on a real system is another. Usually technical systems at some point require explicit types. Something somewhere needs instructions on how to handle the data and this usually leads to some kind of typing instructions being added along with the data. But depending on how many abstraction layers there are, this can soon become a very pedantic discussion. I feel what matters is the design, definition and intend of a language. The actual technical implementation isn't what matters in my opinion.
I feel like there are so many programming languages and technical systems at this point, every variation and exception exists. And if you can think of one that doesn't exist, expect a follow up comment of somebody pointing out it does exist after all, or them having started a project to make it exist in the near future.
Would you say OCaml or any ml family language would be untyped since they have type inference?
From what I know about those I would consider those to be typed languages. Even if the programmer doesn't explicitly assign the types, he needs to be aware of them and take into account what type something will be. I am familiar with F# and it's strongly typed for example.
We're also at the point where traditionally untyped languages can be strictly typed (strict typescript), and typed languages can be weakly typed (Java's var)
Untyped as in written? Or is this programming term I'm not familiar with?
Programming term. Variables in programming languages can hold different types of data, such as whole numbers, floating point numbers or strings of characters ("text"). Untyped languages figure out on the fly what can and cannot be done to the content of a variable, while typed languages strictly keep track of the type of content (not the value) to catch bugs and improve performance, for example.
Ah! Thank you for the explanation. That makes much more sense now.
Very concise explanation!
Any untyped languages that don't care what is in the variable, assumes you know what your doing, and YOLOs it?
Np necessarily. Usually errors are detected at runtime and reported as such. So you will see where your program failed, but it usually crashes nonetjeless. Keep in mind that crashes are usually better than continuing some undefined behavior.
By typed they mean declairing a type for your variables.
In some languages, variables needs to be told what kind of data they can hold. That's it's type. For instance a number without decimals would be an integer type. While text might be a string type or a list of character types.
Other languages don't require types and sometimes don't even support them. They will just infer the type from the data that's in the variable.
If you see Elon Musk please explain this to him.
I'm an idiot, and I still don't think I could dumb it down to his level.
Might be able to call assembly untyped. Everything beyond that I think would be called either statically or dynamically typed, maybe weakly typed?
It's actually hieroglyphics.
Even in untyped can't you explicitly set your type either with declarations or wrapping the value in quotes for a string or something?
Depends on the language. There is no explicit typing in JavaScript, for example. That's why Typescript was invented.
Not always.
Ah, that could be problematic