Having programmed in C for about 15 years, five of which I also used Pasal (ugh), I fall strongly on the "weak typing" side of this argument.

Strong typing strikes me as 'training wheels' for beginner programmers who may need guidance not to do Stupid Things. Once one moves from Pascal to C or Perl, the training wheels come off, and all manner of bizarre and odd things are possible. This includes trying to add incompatible types: C will give you a compile time warning but may try to do what you are asking, with unpredictable results. Perl will probably go ahead and give you something weird and trust that you know what you're doing.

That last bit is important. Perl trusts that you know what you're doing. It assumes if you really want to add "10 apples" and "20 apples", it will do its best to give you what it thinks is the answer. And that's the reason that I really enjoy Perl -- it gives me the same amount of freedom as C to do what I think is correct.

And I truly hope that Damian and Larry (and whoever else we can persuade) will allow stricter typing in Perl 6, but as just an option. Please.

Although Damian can be so darn persuasive. :)

--t. alex

"Nyahhh (munch, munch) What's up, Doc?" --Bugs Bunny

ps Fascinating thread.