Tuesday, June 3, 2003

Multimethods

Dan Sugalski does a great job of explaining multimethods. And there’s more:

Haskell, for example, allows you to dispatch based on the values that are passed, as well as their types. This is a tremendously powerful mechanism, though one that’s not often implemented. (I have a nagging suspicion that’s as much because it becomes close to impossible to mathematically prove a program's correctness with this scheme as the cost, and the folks doing language research tend to be of a theoretical bent. I may be wrong, though)

I worked on a language that had where clauses, a slight generalization of his example. You could say stuff say foo(a, b : Int) where a ~= b/2 or foo(e : E, l : Seq[E]) where e = head(l). The language was designed with theorem proving in mind. However, this does complicate some things. And what do you do if the where clauses of the different methods aren’t disjoint?

Two more points:

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