Re: RFC 98 (v1) context-based method overloading
[email protected] (Hildo Biersma) Mon, 14 Aug 2000 20:10:26 +0100
| Newsgroups | perl.perl6.language.subs |
|---|---|
| Organization | Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. |
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
> The other way C++ allows you to overload a named function is > by return type. This document is a companion piece to > a similarly named one about protoypes. It replaces old Perl's > "wantscalar" and "wantarray" kluges, which can now be deprecated, > with a cleaner interface allowing decisions which are possible to > make at compile time to be made then. C++ emphatically does *not* support overloading on return type only. That has a very simple reason: unlike Pascal, C++ does not force you to assign the result of a method or function call to a variable, so it cannot always tell what you're doing. The same reason pretty much goes for perl: if I have array and hash versions of a function, how can it tell which one to call if I don't assign the results? Hildo