In addition to what stvn said, I'd just like to add that the design of the type system and particular the signature system depends on certain guiding principles. One of these stvn alluded to, which is that it doesn't cost much to wedge in extra options at a point where you're already obligated to make an n-way choice, such as at the dispatcher selection boundary, or at the wrapper/wrappee boundary in &foo.

One principle he kinda glosses over is that we tend to build features into the signature/type system when it replaces code you'd have to write yourself, and probably do a poorer job at. Signature types are not there primarily so that your routine can wring its hands over the shoddy data it is receiving. You can use them for that, of course, but the signature types are there mostly so that the MMD dispatcher can decide whether to call your routine in the first place. That's just an extension of the idea that you shouldn't generally check the type of your invocant because the dispatcher wouldn't call you in the first place unless the type were consistent. By putting the type declaratively into the signature, we can give the information to the MMD dispatcher without committing to a type check where the computer can figure out that it would be redundant.

And the whole MMD dispatch system is there to replace the nested switch statements or cascaded dispatches you'd have to do to solve the problem if you rolled your own solution. And then it would still be subtly wrong in those cases where you're tricked into imposing a hierarchy on invocants that should be treated equally. The whole Perl 5 overloading scheme is a case study in that sort of error...

Likewise the rest of the signature binding power is provided to declaratively replace all the boilerplate procedural code that people have to write in Perl 5 to unpack @_. Even if the declarations just generate the same boilerplate code and we get no performance boost, we've at least saved the user from having to watch the faulty rivets pop out of their boilerplate. Not to mention having to stare at all that boilerplate in the first place...

Anyway, those are some of the principles that have guided us. We may have certainly screwed them up in spots, and doubtless we'll find some bottlenecks in the design that we didn't anticipate because we're just too stupid. But as you may have noticed, we're trying really hard to design a language where we can compensate for our own stupidities as we figure them out over the long term. If there's anything that can't be fixed in the design, that's probably it.

In reply to Re^4: Informal Poll: why aren't you using traits? by TimToady
in thread Informal Poll: why aren't you using traits? by Ovid

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