Well - as I just remembered - at least we don't need a new flag, but a type attribute.

my TYPE VARLIST

This obscure feature of my was already there since the very beginning of Perl 5

> is going to help serialisation as much as people expect.

I think not only serialization could profit here.

But lexical types largely don't do what people expect; in particular, they don't stop something which isn't an Int or whatever from being assigned to the lex var; nor do they coerce the assigned value to that type.

In general, adding types to perl is a big topic which tends to trigger the occasional heated discussion on p5p and elsewhere.

Dave.

Yes I remember digging into it and the fields Pragma.

And ....

# this will generate a compile-time error
my Foo $foo = Foo->new;
[download]

I could see a use case in extending this already existing syntax for other purposes, like

• allowing to translate a subset of Perl to inline C
• helping IDEs to intellisense method expansions
• defining an initial type (e.g. for serializers ; sic)

But probably I'm naive.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
see Wikisyntax for the Monastery}