I am a bear of very little brain but recently, during a prolonged wrestling match with the type system in Visual Basic for Application' I think I had an interesting idea namely that Types, per se, are a case of premature optimisation.
It seems to me that Types come with a whole host of hidden assumptions which are difficult or impossible for a programmer to modify or maniplulate. Having played a little with nim for some Advent Of Code problems I thought nim might be a good candidate for opening up what makes up a type. So instead of Types being black boxes what if they were replaced by collection of policies and the issue of how many bits to used to implement those policies being wholly transferred to the responsibility of the compiler. The policies would be very simple things like that describe what operations may be performed on a block of memory • Writable • readable • persistent • PositionalSymbols ' each symbol in a literal is x times the one to the left • SequenceSymbols ' a symbol array/list • SymbolEnum(Unicode,Ansi etc etc etc) • Incrementable (also means decrementable) and so on. I'll go get my coat.........
