At 03:59 PM 8/3/00 -0700, Nathan Wiger wrote:
> > Several people have requested strong typing as a feature, but have been
> shot
> > down with reasons such as "it's un-Perl-like", with an added "it'll slow
> > everything down for those who don't want it".
>
>Definitely.
Maybe. And it may speed things up. And finally if we do the vtable
implementation of variables, at worst it'll only impact those variables
that are strongly typed.
> > Unfortunately, accessing and manipulating tied variables is incredibly
> slow,
> > so improving their speed is a large part of making this proposal feasible.
>
>I think a lot of effort should be put into improving tie(). There are
>tons of advantages to tie, and it could be used in incredibly flexible
>ways in Perl6 as I see it. While this is mainly an internals issue, I
>think it should be pretty high on the priority list.
The language semantics of tie strongly impact the internals. tie() is
basically a declaration that the rules are completely different (and
unknown at compile time) for the tied variable. Shoots down optimization a
bunch, since access to a tied varible has to be treated as a function call
rather than as access to data with known behaviours.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
