Totally agree packed has a strong meaning of fixed offsets et al. Probably a
bad choice of worlds.
Part of my thought for going to a more functional interface is that the
properties could be closed in the definitions. Hence we could have
Foo = Immutable( ... )
Which wraps the properties of the type away from the end user. Personally I'd
rather get away from reserved words in the parser and have more natively in
julia. A person writing a c interface might use a type 'cstruct' which has
appropriate properties (and constraints ) on the types which may be used in it.
The average user wouldn't see nor use this. It would allow clean extension
though, for example a gpu api which only allows float not double could define
its own type creator.
You can do this today with macros, but that seems like a patch round not
exposing directly to julia in the first place.
