"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