Late early bound

My last post got at least two people thinking. I made the suggestion to add a sub called pretty-print to make the resulting text/html human friendly. Since this is a nice name, making it a multi seams a polite move.

multi sub pretty-print(html::("NON-QUOTE") $html) { ... }

Since html is a singleton of an anonymous class, we can’t easily refer to the role NON-QUOTE within. We use a runtime lookup to get hold of the type at compile time. Said compile time is actually quite late. It happens at the same time constants are evaluated. Hence, html‘s guts can be queried, because that constant expression is further up in the file.

I did not know that type constraints are turned into type objects that late and found it difficult to explain. We may have to invent time travel to learn the time traveller language to be able to explain the order of operations of Rakudo.