Having read up in the past on Perl5 internals, it seems to be capable of keeping more than one representation of a Scalar active at a time.
Anyone know if there are plans to do this kind of optimisation?
I don't think, this is an optimization at least not for an average program. Processor cycles are cheap these days, memory access still isn't. A lot of my recent work was to reduce the scalar size from 32 to 20 byte (32bit). This almost doubles performance on accessing huge (1e6) data sets.
OTOH, if there is a clear need for an e.g. NumStr hybrid, then it should be a separate PMC which is used, when $HL says so by some traits.
Regards,
Nick
leo
