alt Hacker NewsSome languages have only a single type, e.g. BrainFuck only has "byte". Shells tend to only have "string" as a fundamental type, and some helpers to do things like split strings on a separator & iterate over the elements or to treat strings as numbers to do arithmetic. Such single-type languages tend to be esoteric and/or difficult to program in, since every sort of data manipulation not supported by that type has to be done at runtime, by the programmer.
> Such single-type languages tend to be esoteric and/or difficult to program in, since every sort of data manipulation not supported by that type has to be done at runtime, by the programmer.
It depends; I recall programming in Tcl in the late 90s, and that has only the string and the list as datatypes, but it felt very powerful, like Lisp but without the easy syntax.