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Postings from January 2020
It seems worth relating a discussion that Karl W. and I had in Salt Lake City some years ago.
The idea was that all strings would be given a three-value state:
1. Character string
2. Byte string
3. Lax/unknown string
# I am making up these QLOPs on the spot.
my $c = qc{Character string};
my $b = qb{Byte string};
my $x = q{Lax string};
$c . $c; # yields a character string
$b . $b; # yields a byte string
$x . $any; # yields a lax string
$c . $b; # runtime error
This would provide the starting ground for making it possible to build type discipline into the runtime. Mostly, you'd have to mark strings as typed as you go. A PerlIO layer could type data as it was read. It's not entirely unlike taint. It was an interesting conversation, but didn't really lead to any action. I think our primary concern, apart from "will it get used and be useful?" was "how badly will XS code screw up its usefulness?". It's been a while.
--
rjbs
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