Re^8: Interesting read: "Why I use perl and still hate dynamic language weenies too"

What?? My life just got so much easier! ;)

But seriously, if I'm confused about this maybe you can clear it up. Is Perl statically typed, dynamically typed, or some crazy other thing that I don't know about?

Perl does "support arrays and hashes", but I was always under the impression that this was a run-time check on tagged values (dynamic) rather than a compile-time check on untagged values (static). Are we saying that Perl is statically typed, where the types are scalar, hash, and array? If it's truly dynamically typed, how can these distinctions arise?

Thanks for your help.

~dewey

Comment on Re^8: Interesting read: "Why I use perl and still hate dynamic language weenies too"

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Re^9: Interesting read: "Why I use perl and still hate dynamic language weenies too" by ikegami (Patriarch) on Apr 17, 2007 at 18:40 UTC
SV (scalar), AV (array), HV (hash), GV (glob), etc are different, independent structures. Different opcodes are used to interact with them. For example, `padsv` is used to fetch an SV lexical, while `padav` is used to fetch an AV lexical. SVs can be IV (signed int), UV (unsigned int), NV (decimal number), PV (string), RV (reference), etc. It can even be certain combinations of those. What you said in your earlier post does apply to scalars.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^10: Interesting read: "Why I use perl and still hate dynamic language weenies too" by dewey (Pilgrim) on Apr 17, 2007 at 18:50 UTC
So Perl is statically typed? ~dewey	[reply]
Re^11: Interesting read: "Why I use perl and still hate dynamic language weenies too" by ikegami (Patriarch) on Apr 17, 2007 at 19:26 UTC
I confused Static vs Dynamic typing with Weak vs Strong typing in my earlier post. To answer your question, some elements of Perl are statically typed, and some elements of Perl are dynamically typed. The question "Is X strongly typed?" is the invalid one. This post by Dominus includes "eight different and incompatible definitions of 'strongly typed language'" he found.	[reply]
Re^12: Interesting read: "Why I use perl and still hate dynamic language weenies too" by dewey (Pilgrim) on Apr 17, 2007 at 19:51 UTC
Re^11: Interesting read: "Why I use perl and still hate dynamic language weenies too" by ikegami (Patriarch) on Apr 17, 2007 at 19:02 UTC
~~Depending on the definition of "statically typed" to which you subscribe, the answer is "yes", "no" or "yes and no". "Is X statically typed?" is never the right question.~~ ~~I wish I could find the document I once encountered. It had at least 10 different definitions for "statically typed language".~~ ( See Re^11: Interesting read: "Why I use perl and still hate dynamic language weenies too" )	[reply]