I recently read a blog post by Alex Miller about Clojure multi-methods.
It described and answered a question his friend had asked him, as well as discussing some related problems. I'm going to showcase the different options Perl 6 provides for solving these same problems. Here's the initial question:
Is it possible to write a multimethod that has defmethods which handle ranges of values? For example, say that a person has an age. Can I write a multimethod that accepts a person as a parameter and returns "child" if age < 16, "adult" if 16 <= age < 66 and "senior" if age >= 66?As in Clojure, the answer is "Sure." In keeping with TIMTOWDI, Perl 6 provides several ways to do this.
This post does a rather good job of covering some of the new features in Perl 6 in a very readable way.
This is impressive. Thanks to @jo for showing it to me.
As you've probably heard by now, Oracle has decided to file suit against Google, claiming multiple counts of infringement against Java or JVM patents and copyrights they acquired when they assimilated Sun Microsystems this past year. Since I'm unlikely to keep my mouth shut about even trivial matters, something this big obviously requires at least a couple thousand words.
It's long, but he has some interesting thoughts and a decent amount of background that I wasn't necessarily aware of. It's nice that he lists all of the patents, too.
Awesome short by Michel Gagné. Now I've got to go and check out the Sensology album. Sounds interesting.