C++ has casts. I don't regard those as making it a "weak" type system. I regard it as "strong type system with escape hatches", which is not the same thing. A strong type system should not be a straightjacket. (Languages that try to make types bulletproof tend to get used less than languages that allow escape hatches, and rightly so. The language designer never knows what the union of all use cases will be. Good language designers know that the user may have a case the designer didn't think of, and allow some flexibility to hopefully handle it.)