I guess because typing is somewhat optional in ML, I don't view it as strong typing really. Again, maybe static is the better word for it.

I think you'll probably confuse a fair number of people :-) I've seen a number of definitions of strong/weak typing but ML would always come in on the strong side. The most common definitions I find are:

• Strong: The language knows what type something is (ML, Perl, etc.)
• Weak: You have to figure out what type something is (C, assembler, etc.)

• Static: We know what type something is at compile time (ML Eiffel, etc.)
• Dynamic: We know what type something is at run time (Perl, Ruby, etc.)

These certainly aren't universal (what I call "dynamic" above are often called "weak" too), but ML would always fall into the "strong" category.

The difference you're talking about (where the language figures out the type of something at compile time without you having to tell it all the time) I've seen called "inferred typing", which seems suitably descriptive.

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