>I think you missed the point. Typing anything just for the sake of keeping the compiler happy should be considered unproductive. Whether we are talking about datasets, com objects or whatever. It certainly has its place when seeking for performance and is a great benefit in certain debugging scenarios, but otoh its a pain if the tools ask the poor programmer something that the tool should be able to figure out itself.
>

Walter, there is no arguing with the fact that typing is a human, not an electronic, artifact.
Way down deep, everything digital has only one type.. and has one of two possible values- zero or one.
So, yes, you are right.. any other typing is an artificial concept whose value is open to question.
Any language that I've seen that deals with anything other than zeroes or one is typed in one way or another.

Consider this VFP code:

a = "A"
b = 1
c= a+b

which crashes.
In the first language I learned, IBM 705III assembler, the answer in c would have been "B."
When you think about it, there's no logical reason that the bits comprising the byte holding 1 can't be added to the bits comprising the byte holding "A."
It's just binary math.
With XBase and similar languages, however, the authors decided to protect us from ourselves by assuming that it's probably a mistake if a programmer is adding a number to a string. That annoyed me at first, but over time I benefitted a lot more from that restriction than it cost me because it uncovered some serious bugs that would have caused me a lot of grief had they gone undetected.
So, in that respect, VFP is a lot more strongly typed than IBM705III assembler was.
Should we go back to IBM705III assembler?
I don't think so.

Here's another point to consider:
Members of my generation came of age before PC's became ubiquitous, so we are generally lousy typists.
Intellisense in VS saves me HOURS each day by auto-completing long operands that I'd surely have misspelt because of lousy typing skills, faulty memory or both.
Intellisense can only do what it does because of strong typing.
I LOVE IT!!!!