> Yes, the interface to the RDBMS is dynamically typed, but the data in > it generally is not. This is a case of dynamic typing being > *unavoidable*. To implement an interface to a system that stores > arbitrary data, you need your interface to handle arbitrary data types. > Therefore, they (correctly) made the tradeoff to dynamic typing. If > you do not *need* to handle arbitrary data, you shouldn't. This is the > same for the container classes; they need to handle arbitrary data, so > they are dynamically typed. One other note... the container classes in Java did not need to be dynamically typed. One could have been implemented for element type, e.g. vector<string>, vector<int>, etc. The designers of Java simply made a trade-off in favor of dynamic typing. Mike