Re: Typing in Ada

["Peter C. Chapin" <pchapin@sover.net>]

"Nick Roberts" <nick.roberts@acm.org> wrote in
news:2i1t1lFij4g5U1@uni-berlin.de: 

> Hehe. I'll think one would find, in practice, that most Ada programs
> tend to be far more strongly typed than C programs. That is to say that
> in most Ada programs it is typical to have constructions such as:
> 
>    type Apples is range 0..100;
>    type Oranges is range 0..200;
> 
>    A: Apples;
>    O: Oranges;
> 
> whereas in typical C programs you either get:
> 
>    typedef int Apples;
>    typedef int Oranges;
> 
>    Apples a;
>    Oranges o;

Yes, Ada provides ranges as distinct types without automatic conversions 
and that's a nice feature. In theory you could get some of the same 
benifits in C by introducing an abstract type (as a structure) to hold a 
range. It could be done much more nicely in C++ using templates, 
overloaded operators, and other C++ features. The reality is, though, that 
many C (or C++) programs don't bother. Perhaps they should.

It's not clear to me how all this relates to the concept of strong typing. 
I guess it would be helpful to have a precise definition of that term. It 
sounds like from what we've said here that strong typing more a matter of 
programming style than a language feature... at least where C and Ada are 
concerned. Is that a valid conclusion?

Peter