It seems to me that there are several advantages to making a group of multi with the same short name a single object, of type MultiSub|MultiMethod, which internally holds references to the all the various routines that share that short name.
It doesn't have to be junctive because for a multi it's irrelevant if it's a method or a sub. This distinction is used only at compile time of the class closure. So I guess there is a
class Multi is Code {...}in Perl 6.
It would behave like a tied sub (or method), with a .dispatch method to decide which of the contained routines should be called this particular time. Manhattan would be the default. However, one can override the dispatch logic; implementing Luke's Patterns idea, for example.
I see. Something like
use MMD::Manhattan; use MMD::Symmetric; use MMD::Pattern; ...
> [..] I don't think there has
been syntax introduced thus far that enables this ability. But it's likely I missed it along the way, like I seem to be missing several other things lately.
I interpret the hash like syntax &foo<Int,Array[Int]> such that &foo represents the complete set of branches of multi sub foo. The only thing I wonder is this also supported for calling particular subs without dispatching: foo<Int>(17)? Or even partial dispatching on the sliced multi? This would BTW be something the optimizer would use as well.
Another thing I haven't seen is how to declare a new multi at runtime. Non-multi's can be created via C< &func := sub {...}; >, but that's destructive to any other routines that might have occupied that namespace.
If the above is correct than it would be more like hash assignment.
There are likely several rough edges in here, and I've by no means convinced myself that this is the Right Thing, but I thought I'd throw the idea out there to what others thought of it.
I see some convergence and choices where that is not the case.
MfG -- TSa (Thomas Sandlaß)
