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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T23:31:59+00:00

I try to understand why Smalltalk is sometimes called dynamically typed and not untyped

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I try to understand why Smalltalk is sometimes called “dynamically typed” and not “untyped” which i also read a lot and which seems to make perfect sense.

There are no type annotations for variables, parameters and method returns in Smalltalk – so what would you compare the type of an object (if you say the type of the object is it’s class) to?

Also dynamically typed is not the same as dynamically type-checked? So if Smalltalk was dynamically typed it would mean, that internally Smalltalk does give types to variables, parameters, method returns at runtime? does it?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    “Dynamically typed” is widely used in certain programming language communities to mean “dynamically checked”. Likewise, in more theory-oriented circles it is widely regarded as being technically misleading, because what is being checked is not types in any formal sense of the word. However, that usage is far too common these days for any chance of correcting it.

    See also my answer to the inverse question for a bit more background.

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