Has there been any discussion about having an "any" type. Something such as:
my any $x = "Hello";
$x = 17.3;
$x = Foo.new;
I realize that this can be accomplished with an untyped variable, but there may be a
reason not to do that. Namely, there most probably will be some sort of pragma like
"use strict 'type'" which will ensure every variable is typed. Furthermore, even it
typed programs it may be useful to have a datastructure that can contain different
types of values (e.g., hash of any, array of any). Therefore, it would be very
convienient to have an any type. It may be that UNIVERSAL's Perl6 counterpart plays
this role, but I would think that it would only hold objects, not things like int and
string (although they could be promoted ot Int and String automatically). Secondly,
if we do have an any type, there should be some way to figure out what the type really
is. Something like, but more powerful than, Perl5's ref function. It should tell the
user what the type is in an easily understandable fashion...it should also give the
user as much information as possible. For example:
my any %hash;
my any @arr;
my int @intarr;
my Foo $f;
%hash{arr} = \@arr;
%hash{intarr} = \@intarr;
%hash{Foo} = $f;
type_of( %hash{arr} ) == ("array", "any" );
type_of( %hash{intarr} ) == ("array", "int" );
type_of( %hash{intarr}[7] ) == ("int");
type_of( %hash{Foo} ) == ("Foo");
On a tangential note, how would you specify a hash of arrays of ints?
Comments?
Tanton
