A note on types and prototypes
R.M. Wharton · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 1983
The notion of "type" in programming languages is considered and the competing notion of "prototype" is introduced. It is shown that a language with prototypes has the same computational power as an analogous language with types, but is conceptually simpler and has fewer rules. Finally, it is shown that a program written in a language with prototypes has a smaller name space than the corresponding program written in a language with types.