What are the safety benefits of a type system?

Posted by vandros526 on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by vandros526
Published on 2013-10-24T17:31:12Z Indexed on 2013/10/24 22:07 UTC
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In Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford, he mentions in his inheritance chapter,

"The other benefit of classical inheritance is that it includes the specification of a system of types. This mostly frees the programmer from having to write explicit casting operations, which is a very good thing because when casting, the safety benefits of a type system are lost."

So first of all, what actually is safety? protection against data corruption, or hackers, or system malfunctions, etc?

What are the safety benefits of a type system? What makes a type system different that allows it to provide these safety benefits?

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