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From: nma124@hotmail.com (steve_H)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Who said strong typing is a benefit?
Date: 12 Oct 2002 18:18:39 -0700
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since many Ada programmers mention as one of Ada benefits is its 
strong typing, I thought some here might find the following 
'interesting' to read.

I guess this is an argument of '4GL' vs '3GL'. The following seems
to imply that not having to declare variables and having the ability to
mix any variable with any in an expression is a 'benefit'. I am not sure
I agree with this, on the other hand, one can not deny that one can
write code faster in matlab than in a strongly typed language such as Ada
specially for scientific applications where arrays and matrices are
heavily used.

I wish there was a 'matlab like' environment based on an Ada like language.

from 

http://www.mathworks.com/company/digest/sept02/accel_matlab.pdf

 
"MATLAB Type Handling
An important benefit of MATLAB is that users do not have
to declare variables to be of certain data types, as is required
with 3GLs. In MATLAB, any variable can be assigned a
value of any type, and that type can be changed implicitly
at will because of an assignment to a new value of a different
type.As a result, the MATLAB interpreter is prepared to
deal with the most complicated data types (such as an ndimensional
array of complex doubles) and is capable of
performing operations no matter what the actual data
types turn out to be at run-time"