On Tuesday, November 26, 2002, at 09:47 AM, Larry Wall wrote:
: > (3) Context. How to determine it, how to force it. Hypothesis: ThereMy own supposition is that it's useful to think of context and type as two sides of the same coin. Context is just the Type you're expecting. (Sounds like a bad country song.)
: > is a one-to-one relationship between Type and Context, such that there
: > is a context that matches every type, and a type that matches every
: > context (except void).
Well, it is a good question. We don't have a type for every context in
Perl 5, particularly for boolean and list context. They just get mapped
onto existing scalar and array types.
Aside from C<void>, is there a reason for that _not_ to be the case?
: > (4) Typecasting. How int <--> num, num <--> str, str <--> bool, etc.
: > Generic typecasting rules: how to define user classes that can typecast
: > to/from str, int, bool, etc. This gets into Perl6 OO, but we may need
: > to request some preliminary decisions before then, because the
: > implications are substantial.
Yes, sorry. I need to break myself of that word. "Coercions" be what I mean.What we're really talking about is coercions or conversions.
MikeL
