The latter works without error because Perl 5 understands that the Dog method may have methods added later, and so does not assume that accessing a currently missing method is bad.

In fact all that it understands are the fields of the object. So yes, it only checks hash access. And I agree with your comments about it not being very useful, which is why I personally don't bother with it.

As for where this idea will go, not very far in Perl 5. In Perl 6 it may mutate into something more useful. But so far all that I can recall is lots of thought, but not much that is concrete.

Incidentally I thought that type inference in Standard ML was a form of strong typing, but I don't know Standard ML. Since you appear to think otherwise, how would you describe the distinction that you'd draw?

In reply to Re^6: use fields; # damnit by tilly
in thread use fields; # damnit by nothingmuch

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