At 5:36 PM -0600 5/31/07, David Green wrote:
On 5/29/07, Larry Wall wrote:
In any case, the Huffman coding is probably right because you want
to declare Any parameters more often than you want to talk about any
possible kind of Object, I suspect.
Are Objects really Everything? What about native types like int --
or (thanks to autoboxing) should I really be thinking of them as
Objects with built-in optimiser hints? Not that I have a good
example of why you'd want to specify a native-only type; I'm only
asking out of pedantic curiosity.
If that's true, then it would probably reinforce my argument for
renaming Object to Universal.
I said before that it is better for type names, or at least the most
important or root part of the name of a type, should describe what it
represents rather than how it is implemented; Object smacks more of
an implementation detail.
If it is true that int et al (ignoring autoboxing) is not conceived
of as an object by users, that reinforces the idea that Universal
sounds more like "everything" than Object does.
-- Darren Duncan
