I've been thinking over my response all of yesterday. What I understand you saying is that Perl's SCALAR type is too broad. To me, this implies that you want to have the optional capability of having a numeric, a string, and a reference type. The argument I hear you and others making is that different operations behave in different ways, depending on the value contained in the SCALAR, thus they should be different types. Then, to maintain compatibility with the best parts of Perl's SCALAR type, all the operators and builtins that we would like to behave agnostically with reference to numerics and strings will be polymorphic. (References, I agree, should be separate from scalars.) And, you want this type-checking to happen at compile-time.

That's a very interesting argument. I'd have to see more details before I can agree or disagree. I like the basic premise, but the devil's in the details.