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in reply to Prototypes allow overloading subs?

Well, yes, sometimes. Especially since I see so much code trying to emulate this behaviour instead, checking if the first argument is a hashref, do this, if it is an arrayref, do that, if it is a coderef, do that etc.

Technically it would not be so much of a difference in most cases, codewise, if you had prototypes (*not* the normal Perl prototypes) do this, as most such overloaded functions do some quick reformatting and then passes the data on to the next in line. So it is really the same, but it is cleaner and easier to read/write. For those that are used to it. :)

But I don't really like that feature when I don't have default arguments to go with it (like C has and Java don't). So that would have to be included, because even though the workaround is simple, it is annoying. :)

Apart from the multimethod module suggested above (which looks pretty cool too), I guess one could do some "preprocessing" magic with a Filter module or something as an alternative. Like I said, having that kind of methods is very similar to do typechecking inside one function instead, so a source filter could probably accomplish this. If someone is bored enough to write it. :)


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