That's actually not exactly right: for example in Forth you really have no types at all.
Also, if somewhat uses a word such as "unityped" or "type with infinitely many variants" you should immediately know that any mention that "there are types, alright, just checked on runtime" will be immediately rejected. Majority of static typing fanatics are like that.
That's not the problem. The problem is that to a first approximation, every language is "type safe" in the sense that you can't add a string to a number. Even in those languages where it looks like you can, it's because of a certain usually-limited set of automatic coercions, not because you can actually add a number to a string.
Truly adding a number to a string looks like this:
number: 0x000000000000002a
string: 0x7ffb000000007264
result: 0x7ffb00000000728e
A term that describes essentially 100% of languages is not a useful one, so static typing usually refers to a language whose type system is somehow more restrictive at compile time than "Everything is a variant type and we'll work it out at runtime".
We're not discussing a concept of "type safety" here at all, but rather a concept of "untypedness". I just can't agree that for example Common Lisp (with CLOS), Smalltalk or Python are "untyped". They are not: untyped language is one which has no type errors both on compile time and runtime (unless I'm very . An obvious example is Assembler, but Forth or TCL qualify too. And quite a few others do too. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language#Typed_vers...
> so static typing usually refers to a language whose type system is somehow more restrictive at compile time than "Everything is a variant type and we'll work it out at runtime"
Again, it was never suggested that Tulip has "static types". It doesn't of course.
What I said is that it has types. I don't want to discuss how much better "static typing" is than "dynamic typing" or vice versa, this makes for a very boring discussion similar to Emacs vs. Vim and I'm not interested in it at all. I just object to the notion that "static types" are the only kind of types we can ever have in a language.
The problem is with "static typing fanatics", really. They'd like to bend the terminology in a way which helps them promote static typing, for example by equating all types with static types. This is both dishonest and unnecessary. No serious static typing advocate would do this (I hope) - static typing is a great idea able to defend on its own, there's no need to lie about "the other side" of the argument.
Well, all fanatics are like that. Way too much Kool-Aid, way too little critical thinking.