In computer science and computer programming, the term strong typing is used to describe those situations where programming languages specify one or more restrictions on how operations involving values having different data types can be intermixed. Its antonym is weak typing. However, these terms have been given such a wide variety of meanings over the short history of computing that it is often difficult to know, out of context, what an individu...
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In computer science and computer programming, the term strong typing is used to describe those situations where programming languages specify one or more restrictions on how operations involving values having different data types can be intermixed. Its antonym is weak typing. However, these terms have been given such a wide variety of meanings over the short history of computing that it is often difficult to know, out of context, what an individual author means when using them.
Most generally, "strong typing" implies that the programming language places severe restrictions on the intermixing that is permitted to occur, preventing the compiling or running of source code which uses data in what is considered to be an invalid way. For instance, an integer division operation may not be used upon strings; a procedure which operates upon linked lists may not be used upon numbers. However, the nature and strength of these restrictions is highly variable.
Benjamin C. Pierce, author of Types...
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