In Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford, he mentions in his inheritance chapter, "The other benefit of classical inheritance is that it includes the specification of a system of types. This mostly frees the programmer from having to write explicit casting operations, which is a very good thing because when casting, the safety benefits of a type system are lost." So first of all, what actually is safety? protection against data corruption, or hackers, or system malfunctions, etc? What are the safety benefits of a type system? What makes a type system different that allows it to provide these safety benefits?