weak-typing

First of all, I have taken a look at the following posts to avoid duplicate question. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1184717/hungarian-notation Why shouldn't I use "Hungarian Notation"? Are variable prefixes (“Hungarian notation”) really necessary anymore? Do people use the Hungarian Naming Conventions in the real world? Now, all of these posts are related to C#, C++, Java - strongly typed languages. I do understand that there is no need for the prefixes when the type is known before compilation. Nevertheless, my question is: Is it worthwhile to use the prefixes in interpreter based

I googled that there is an is_a? function to check whether an object is an integer or not. But I tried in rails console, and it doesn't work. I ran the code like the following: "1".is_a? 1.is_a? Did I miss something? There's not a built in function to say if a string is effectively an integer, but you can easily make your own: class String def int Integer(self) rescue nil end end This works because the Kernel method Integer() throws an error if the string can't be converted to an integer, and the inline rescue nil turns that error into a nil. Integer("1") -> 1 Integer("1x") -> nil Integer("x")

The way I understand it, the following is allowed in PHP because it's a weakly-typed language. $var = 'Hello'; $var = 5; I just installed a Windows version of Python 2.6 and I was expecting it NOT to let me change type just like that, but the Python equivalent of the above code works just like in PHP yikes! >>> var = "Hello" >>> type(var) <type 'str'> >>> var = 5 >>> type(var) <type 'int'> Is my understanding of weak/strong typing flawed? Your example demonstrates dynamic typing, not weak typing. Dynamic typing generally means that the type of data an object can store is mutable; any target

Can someone tell me what Strong typing and weak typing means and which one is better? That'll be the theory answers taken care of, but the practice side seems to have been neglected... Strong-typing means that you can't use one type of variable where another is expected (or have restrictions to doing so). Weak-typing means you can mix different types. In PHP for example, you can mix numbers and strings and PHP won't complain because it is a weakly-typed language. $message = "You are visitor number ".$count; If it was strongly typed, you'd have to convert $count from an integer to a string,