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> strong/weak as an alternative to expressive Expressiveness is always relative to what a system is meant to express. The purpose of a type system isn't to wri

> strong/weak as an alternative to expressive Expressiveness is always relative to what a system is meant to express. The purpose of a type system isn't to write your actual programs in it. You use a type system to make sure that programs written in another language (a term language) make sense. So a type system is expressive to the extent it accurately captures the distinction between programs that make sense and programs that don't. (Of course, Goedel tells us that no decidable type system can perfectly capture this distinction.) As for strong/weak, I don't think the concept is very useful without a clear technical definition in the first place.

kbenson 10y ago
> As for strong/weak, I don't think the concept is very useful without a clear technical definition in the first place. Well, it's definitely not very useful in our case. ;) In all seriousness, as I said previously, I think it's useful for conveying a mixed bag of things to people that aren't very well versed in the specifics. If the person knows something about type systems, you should naturally have more specific language to fall back on to express your intent better. In any case, I think we are way past of this being worthwhile to continue. I think we've plumbed the depths of this topic, whether we agree or not.