C strongly typed?

[Brett J. Vickers]

ftw at quasar.westford.ccur.com (Farrell Woods) writes:
>>In article <1990Mar7.182230.5517 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>>>                                  C's type system is not extensible unless
>>>you count "struct", but the language is strongly typed -- mixing random
>>>types is not allowed.
>
>Henry's right!  The point is that `char' and `int' (and, `short' and `long')
>all describe *integer* quantities.  It's just that the range os values which
>each of these "types" can hold differs due to the amount of storage allocated
>to a variable of a given type.

If C were as strongly typed a language as Ada is, it would require that
a cast (or conversion) be used before setting two different "types" of integers
equal.  If C were as strongly typed a language as Ada (or Pascal) is, it
would not allow integers to be accessed and stored as char types.

I'm not knocking this flexible typing; I find it extremely useful.

--
bvickers at bonnie.ics.uci.edu