Has anyone given thought to how an SV can contain both a numeric value
and string value in Perl6?
Given the arbitrary number of numeric and string types that the vatble
scheme of Perl6 support it will be unviable to to have special types
for all permuations (eg, utf8_nv, unicode32_iv, ascii_bitint, ad nauseum).
It seems to me the following options are poossible:
1. We no longer save conversions, so
$i="3"; $j+=$i for (...);
does an aton() or similar each time round the loop
2. Each SV has 2 vtable pointers - one for it's numeric representation
(if any), and one for its string represenation (if any). Flexible, but
may require an extra 4/8 bytes per SV.
3. We decree that all string to numeric conversions should return
a particular numeric type (eg NV), and that all numeric to string
conversions should similary convert to a fixed string type (eg utf8).
(Although I'm not sure that really helps.)
4. Err, that's it.
Any opinions?
