HaloO,
Larry Wall wrote:
On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 07:25:11AM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
: I'm suspecting that the answer is "yes, they are universal",
: but wanted to confirm it.
Confirmed. (Though note that Str.reverse probably overrides
Any.reverse, unless we give string reversal a different name.)
Just a thought from my side: doesn't it make sense to unify the
concept of numeric conversion as discussed recently and the
universal methods in Any? The idea is that after a failed dispatch
of 'foo'.join(':') a coercion 'Item as List' is invoked and a one
element list dispatch ('foo',).join(':') is attempted and succeeds.
Note that a round-trip conversion 'Item as List' and 'List as Item'
is lossless and perhaps even identity preserving---that is WHICH
remains unaltered but WHAT switches from Item to List and back.
This would save lots of overloads in Any in favor of a handful of
standard coercions. These need proper anchorage in the dispatch
system, of course. That to me means we need some definition of
"conversion quality" and "conversion distance".
Regards, TSa.
--
"The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity" -- C.A.R. Hoare
"Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it." -- A.J. Perlis
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... = -1/12 -- Srinivasa Ramanujan
