"Justin Johnson" wrote in .... > IMHO, I think that having dispatch like this would be cool. But... > > Issues: > > 1. It would have to be optional. Each parameter could be either a var (as > it is now) or a class and var pair to specify specialization. > > 2. Making it efficient could be difficult. It could potentially affect the > speed of all method lookups because a method call would have to get the This is not necessarily true - You could make the the overridden arguments part explicit. For example we might write f(i, am , a, the overridden, part ; rest, of, the, *arguments ) .... > Example: > 3. Bignum and Fixnum. Conversion between these are automatic. How does > this affect specialization? As much as I like to argue with Guy over over overloading;-) I agree with him that mixing automatic conversion and overloading is a very bad idea (so bad that rather not have any overloading at all) /Christoph