[MJ] - After watching Christian Gollwitzer and [dkf]'s talks on EuroTcl I was contemplating an idea for [Tcl9]. A big reason of Tcl's flexibility is brought by [EIAS], however this is a double edged sword. * It's slow. * It makes intellisense like tools virtually impossible. So how about a Typed Tcl where you can define and use Tcl_Objs with a specific internal representation and conversion functions to other intreps without passing to string. You would need to declare the value as a typed value and as soon as you play the EIAS card, you will get an error unless you make the shimmer explicit. This has a couple of benefits. * You wont break EIAS (it just needs to be explicit) so if you use a part of Tcl which is not type aware you need to pass `toString $var` instead of `$var` * You can go fast if you have a direct `intrep_type_a` to `intrep_type_b` function defined. This approach is complementary to the approach of speeding up Tcl by code analysis. Sometimes I will just know when I don't need [EIAS] but I will just need speed instead. [DKF]: The current diagram of what types we've found in the [tclquadcode] work is: !!!!!! [tcl-types.png%|% width=500] !!!!!! Yes, it's a bit complicated. No, not everything is a string, but most things are (the things which aren't don't appear as values you can manipulate and so can be ignored). **How could it look?** ====== settyped a list {a b c d} puts $a; # error, can't use a tped Tcl_Obj as a string puts [toString $a]; # ok $a is now untyped dict get $a c; # error if there is no list->dict conversion dict get [toString $a c]; # ok, EIAS ====== On second thought, this will require a library user to cast every returned value to an untyped Tcl value to prevent errors, so this seems to be similar to Java land `Object`. <> Enter categories here