Is my understanding of type systems correct?

Question

The following statements represent my understanding of type systems (which suffers from too little hands-on experience outside the Java world); please correct any errors.

Answer 1

There seems to be at least two different kinds of weakly typed languages (or perhaps a continuum):

• In C and assembler, values are basically buckets of bits, so anything is possible and if you get the compiler to dereference the first 4 bytes of a null-terminated string, you better hope it leads somewhere that does not contain legal machine code.

I would disagree with this statement, at least in C. You can manipulate the type system in C in such a way that you can treat any given memory location as a bucket of bits, but a variable most definitely has a type and that type has specific properties. The fact that there are no runtime checks (unless you consider floating point exceptions or segmentation faults to be runtime checks) isn't really relevant. C can be considered "weakly typed" in the sense that the compiler will perform some implicit type conversion for you, but it doesn't go very far with it.