A new storage specifier might work, but the best way I've seen to implement this is to go all of the way to a full-fledged metaobject system. At the point where you can separate method dispatch from the normal global lookup system plus inheritance fallback, you allow for the possibility of type specialization and optimization, perhaps through a finalization system or (my preference) a tracing optimizer at runtime.

From there you can get to autounboxing-style optimizations. (Remember that research into Self and Smalltalk and Strongtalk shows that 90% of all dynamic language programs are statically analyzable.)

In reply to Re^7: Some thoughts on Moose Attributes by chromatic
in thread Some thoughts on Moose Attributes by John M. Dlugosz

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