Walter

>I've seen lots of comments on the merit of strong and weak typing. This is of course also on topic that is discussed when talking about differences between VFP and .NET.

Most high-end dev. language tends to be "strongly typed". There are few notable exceptions including smalltalk, python, php (for what it's worth) and most recently ruby. And Vfp of course.

Googling on "python dynamic strong typing" is very informative. By the way VFP is not weakly typed but "strongly typed". perl is the typical "weakly typed language".

It looks like delivering a commercial-grade "strongly typed" dev. language is a task that only big names (MS, Sun, ...) can afford to-day. So do not expect the big league to push light solutions based on run-times that can be produced by "open source" communities.

So if you want a commercial view on the subject read what your favorite "software editor" has to say about it. They will stand on "strong typing rules" for both good and bad reasons.

If you want a more agnostic view on strong vs dynamic typing take the time to read about it with a python perspective (both on the python user group - a public newsgroup) or on the python-dev list.

You will discover that the points you made (all of them!) are exactly the one recently mentioned on the python forums.

Francois