RE: another take on hackers and painters

[Shriram Krishnamurthi <address@hidden>]

Anton van Straaten wrote:

> As an aside, if I were forced to pick a rule for implicit coercion, I'd say
> that the type of the first (leftmost) value should determine the type of the
> coercion [...]

I disagree.  I think the lesson we've learned from the evolution of
multimethods is to make their dispatch symmetric, not pick arbitrary
orders.  (If the point of multimethods is to break the tyranny of the
single dispatcher, no point reintroducing inequity.)

Shriram