Can someone tell me what Strong typing and weak typing means and which one is better?

Question

Can someone tell me what Strong typing and weak typing means and which one is better?

Answer 1

Strong typing is the most common type model in modern programming languages. Those languages have one simple feature - knowing about type values in run time. We can say that strong typed languages prevent mixing operations between two or more different kind of types. Here is an example in Java:

String foo = "Hello, world!";
Object obj = foo;

String bar = (String) obj;
Date baz = (Date) obj; // This line will throw an error

The previous example will work perfectly well until program hit the last line of code where the ClassCastException is going to be thrown because Java is strong typed programming language.

When we talk about weak typed languages, Perl is one of them. The following example shows how Perl doesn't have any problems with mixing two different types.

$a = 10;
$b = "a";
$c = $a . $b;
print $c; # returns 10a

I hope you find this useful,

Thanks.