On Sat, 9 Oct 2004, Sam Ruby wrote: > Inheritance can reduce the combinatorial problem, but it can introduce a > precendence question. The most interesting case still seems to be: > > mmd_lookup(MMD_ADD, PerlString, PyString)
What if, as a fallback mechanism, the foreign object were cast into a simpler type? The PyString could just have a marker on it that says it should be downcast into a native string (or ParrotString) in cross language situations. You could do the same for all the basic types. That way, if you evaluate $perlString + $pyString in perl, you get perlish behavior, and if you evaluate perlString+pyString in python, you get pythonic behavior. The only requirement is that you have an adapter to make the language-specific types adhere to the generic interface. Zope and Twisted do this kind of thing all the time: http://twisted.sourceforge.net/TwistedDocs-1.2.0/howto/components.html - Michal http://withoutane.com/
