On 2003-12-09T18:16:51-0800, Chris Page wrote: > I don't see what this has to do with static or dynamic typing. It has > more to do with whether or not your language allows for some type of > polymorphism so you can use the same function/message name, which is an > orthogonal concern. Dylan, Lisp, Smalltalk and C++ all allow for this. I don't know of any language said to be dynamically typed that allows for dispatch based on return type; do you? (Perl's wantarray only goes so far; specifically, it does not look beyond a function's immediate caller and so cannot deal with higher-order function combinators, such as the "." for function composition that I used in my code example, or recursion. I suppose you can always implement a type inference engine in Smalltalk...) (In a similar vein, I also don't know how to dispatch based on different function types, e.g., treat functions that return integers differently from functions that return file handles without calling them.) On 2003-12-09T18:23:44-0800, Mike Austin wrote: > Some of us are not familliar with this syntax, what is going on here? Does > read know how to read because of its next operation? I think you have the right intuitive idea. -- Edit this signature at http://www.digitas.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/ken/sig International Human Rights Day * 2003-12-10 * http://www.un.org/rights/ What if All Chemists Went on Strike? (science fiction) http://www.iupac.org/publications/ci/2003/2506/iw3_letters.html
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