I agree pretty much totaly. ("Never say never".)

This is going to be one of the nice things about perl6 -- you can nicely mix both styles, and declare a hash with limited namespace, each entry of which has a specific type, and thus get somthing like a C struct with known size and thus more optimizable.

You can also have limited namespace but not declare the types of the entries strictly. Or pretty well anything else you can think of.

Because the parrot virtual machine resembles a real machine, we can pull on all the experince with compiler optimization to real (register) machines.