Dear Julia-dev,
first of all, a big hat off for Julia. I've started experimenting with it
and I'm very very impressed.
While I was redesigning some code I had that I was porting to Julia, I kept
reaching for dispatch based on a (constant) value of an argument, like
foo(:a, arg1, arg2) -> do something
foo(:b, arg1, arg2) -> do something else
This is something one could achieve with Haskell's data constructors or
Clojure's multimethods and it's convenient.
I'm aware of PatternDispatch.jl, but maybe just allowing a type to be
parameterized with a particular value, like Type{:a} (or ValueType{:a}, for
instance), could fit well in Julia's design of the type system and would
not really have any overhead.
This would allow to write things like:
function foo(s::Type{:a}, arg1, arg2)
do_something()
end
function foo(s::Type{:b}, arg1, arg2)
do_something_else()
end
Of course it's totally possible I'm not getting Julia's design right, so I
apologize in advance.
Thanks for such a great language, keep kicking!
Luca
