Pipoca , 11 months ago

Bob Harper uses ‘unityped’ in his post about how dynamic typing is a static type system with a single type in disguise. I’ve literally never heard “monotyped” used as a term in a dynamic context.

In Types and Programming Languages, Ben Pierce says “Terms like ‘dynamically typed’ are arguably misnomers and should probably be replaced by ‘dynamically checked’, but the usage is standard”. Generally, you’ll see ‘tag’ used by type theorists to distinguish what dynamic languages are doing from what a static language considers a type.

Type systems have existed as a field in math for over a century and predate programming languages by decades. They do a slightly different sort of thing vs dynamic checking, and many type system features like generics or algebraic data types make sense in a static context but not in a dynamic one.