User-defined Types

["Herchenroeder, Thomas" <address@hidden>]

I'd like to through in a thought about strong-typed languages and
user-defined types. One problem I found with languages that require you to
supply type declarations was that with user-defined types they never
provided you with sufficient means to define *precisely* which values your
new type should have.

There's another little language called Euphoria
(http://www.RapidEuphoria.com/), that comes with a very convincing solution.
Types are effectively single-argument, user-supplied functions, and take the
form:

	type <name>(<basetype> parm) <code> end type

where <code> must return a boolean value. So e.g. to define a new type
"hour" you could say (from the doc,
http://www.RapidEuphoria.com/refman_2.htm#43):

        type hour(integer x)
            return x >= 0 and x <= 23
        end type

For the <basetype>, you can fall back to "object", which matches any type.
Any algorithm can be used to include or exclude values. This function will
be called at runtime, whenever a variable of the type is assigned to or a
parameter of that type is passed to a function, to check the value
constraints are met. But this runtime check can be disabled. 

I think this is a wonderful solution, giving you maximum power to specify
what your types should be like, in a generic and elegant manner.

=Thomas