What is strong-typing

Question

Hi.. Ques : What is strong-typing versus weak-typing in ASP.NET? Which is preferred? Why?

Sam Hobbs · Answer

The following is a small JavaScript script that shows weak typing. Here i is first an integer but then it is a string. C# does not allow this. function Divide(i) { return i / 2; } i = 9; WScript.Echo(Divide(i)); i = nine ; WScript.Echo(Divide(i)); Output: 4.5 -1.#IND

Sam Hobbs · Answer

C# is strongly typed so using C# as a sample of weak typing is confusing. In the sample code i will always be an integer. Always! You can define another i in a different scope with a different type but then it is a different i.

Senthilkumar · Answer

When you say strong type its concrete type which is type specific and it will not give any run time error related to type conversion. It is type safe. When you say weak type its object type it has to be type converted into strong type based on needs. It may give the runtime error. For example int i =100; It is integer type and type specific. string str = senthil //It is type safe and strongly typed int i = 65; string str = kumar; object obj = i; object obj = str; int k = (int) obj; Now you know what happens when you convert the type. It will give the runtime error and weakly typed. Preferred: It always prefers to use the strongly typed and you can use the generic template to store type specific. Because it does not need any type casting and which will avoid the run time error. It will decrease the performance of the application.

Sam Hobbs · Answer

I am nearly certain that there is no such thing as types in ASP.Net. Everything is the same type in ASP.Net. ASP.Net is not considered a language. The languages usually used in ASP.Net are C# and VB. You probably meant to ask about strong typing and weak typing in C# and VB and Vulpes tried to answer that question. Note that strong typing is generally considered better by enthusiasts of langauges that support strong typing and weak typing is considered better by enthusiasts of languages that support weak typing. I certainly consider strong typing to be better. I even do not like implicit types (the var keyword). In Vulpes's code s will always be a string and i will always be an int. Therefore they are strongly typed. In weak typing it is possible to assign a string to a variable then assign an integer to the same variable. Then depending on what type of data that the variable contains the program might get an exception or it might not. The program cannot assume that a variable is something; a variable can be of any type that the program uses for the variable. So a certain line of code in a program might work many times and many executions but then crash the program when it processes a variable that has been set to a type that the source code line does not expect.

Vulpes · Answer

Strong-typing means that variables can only contain or refer to instances of a particular type. Weak-typing means that variables can contain or refer to instances of ANY type. Although a language such as C# is generally strongly-typed you can do weak-typing using variables of either the object or dynamic types. For example: string s = Hello; // strongly-typed int i = 3; // strongly-typed object o1 = s; // weakly-typed object o2 = i; // weakly-typed Strong-typing should normally be preferred over weak-typing because it enables more errors to be identified at compile time. Also there is no need for boxing/unboxing when value types (such as int double bool etc) are assigned to object variables which slows down your code.