Re: type-checking [Was: What is Perl?]

[Tim Bunce]

On Tue, Aug 01, 2000 at 09:25:33PM +0000, Nick Ing-Simmons wrote:
> Alan Burlison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >
> >No, I disagree.  Perl gains a lot of its expressive power from being lax
> >about typing.  I suspect it will also impose an unacceptable overhed for
> >the vast majority who don't want it - at the very least every variable
> >access will have to check an 'are you typed' flag. 
> 
> Cross posted to internals ('cos it is...)
> 
> We should consider using "vtables" to avoid the cost of the conditional 
> branches (and running out of flag bits).
> 
> Thus this function would call variables "type check" "method" - 
> which for normal case would be pointer to blue-white-hot "NoOp" function
> which is near always in-cache, for a typed var it could be a slow 
> as you wanted...

I agree with all this.

Tim.