From: Avatar [mailto:acampbellb / hotmail.com] > Are there real tangible benefits that non-declared, dynamically typed > (at binding time) variables provide? Or do dynamic variables simply > create less compile time errors and more (harder to catch) runtime > errors? Every language feature that reduces how much typing I have to do is a tangible benefit to me. It eases stress on my body machine, and speeds the delivery of my code. The only downside I can think of is that typos may not be caught for instance/class variables as readily: class Foo def bar @somethingDelicious = 12 end def whee print( @sonethingDeIicious ) end end If you personally find that you are having trouble in this arena, I suspect that it wouldn't be hard to write a code analyzer that alerted on potential misspellings. I've personally not needed it.