Hi hugo,

>By the way....

>In the discussion about dynamic languages, I am closer to your position than to Martín's, but I lack the knowledge to enter any discussion, is just gut feelings, so I stay away from it :)

To clarify, my first message about this topic was just ment to cause this discussion we have. I have started a thread a week or so before this thread but did not have the attention it deserved. KevinMcN made an arguments about strong typing be an advantage so I used the opportunity to start a discussion on this topic. It seems I succeeded. So I intentially did post a message that static typing is going to lose popularity.

Conslusion of this thread is that there is no right or wrong. Static and dynamically typed languages have different charachteristics and therefore have advantages and disadvantages depending on how you use it. Scripting languages tend to be dynamically typed. Dynamically typed language tend to be easier to get productive in, and doing prototyping is easier in dynamically typed languages than in static typed ones. Static typed languages tend to have performance advantages over dynamically typed language as the compiler can optimize the native code for that.
Static type languages make it easier to detect certian typing problems or mistypes, though from a theoretical POV this is also possible to some extent in dynamically type langages, but we did not advance that far (I've had a comment from JohnK that improvements in this area are beeing considered for an next VFP version).

A relatively new argument is the one about intellisense drilling into objects, properties, comobjects, dlls etc. Though certainly possible to some extent in VFP, it does not have the quality .NEt has. However, I'm not sure how this all relates to the discussion as some points are just weaknesses in the VFP implementation and do not have neccesarely have anything to do with the discussion about static and dynamic typing.

>I love Smalltalk, in Smalltalk, everything is an object, so no need to even give a type to the variables you declare. Of course, this means you do not have intellisense (at least never saw intellisense with Smalltalk, but I did not see any of the new releases) and Martín also mentioned other shortcomings, but He must be wrong, Smalltalk is perfection :)

I've never used smalltalk, but I know from people who used it, it is very powerfull and OO.

Walter,