Larry Wall larry-at-wall.org |Perl 6| wrote:
On a more fundamental level, I wonder what the social ramifications are. First, to what extent is this something that will interfere with people who don't want to learn higher-order typing in order to get their job done, but will be forced to because one of their cohorts is using it, or the boss mandates it? And will Perl get a Haskellian only-a-genius-can-use-it reputation because of that? Second, is anybody actually going to implement it? We're pretty short of volunteers as it is, and I don't think I'm smart enough to do it, and I'm very, very slow to put anything into Perl that I don't know how to implement.
I've posted on PerlMonks to get a broader opinion from those besides who directly told me what was needed/semiplanned already.
My own interest is in incrementally adding types to "maintain" existing code that grows, so I'm keeping that clearly in mind. That's also why I proposed "isa", to let people stay in their comfort zone and know they are checked against accidentally needing the fancy stuff to proceed.
Maybe it will be as exotic as those who write the DB ties. But it's under the hood and there for others to use the benefits from.
In other discussions (with Prof Simmons) I've looked at how run-time checking blends into optional strong typing, as part of this design.
I also want to document the algorithm in some detail, to make sure that different implementations conform. So implementors will be told exactly how to do it. It's really no worse than generics already planned in the synopses, really! I can get very close to F-bounds constraints just by using existing features and syntactic sugar.
--John
