I was recently looking at the wikipedia page for dependent types, and I was wondering; does Perl 6 actually introduce dependent types? I can\'t seem to find a reliable source cl
Against Ven, in the comments following the Perl 6 answer to the SO question "Is there a language with constrainable types?", wrote "perl6 doesn't have dependant types" and later wrote "dependent type, probably not, ... well, if we get decidable where
s..." in an exchange on #perl6. (Larry Wall's response was "what's a few halting problems among friends". Btw, by far the best way to get an authoritative answer on all things Perl 6 is to ask TimToady via #perl6.)
For The summary for the 'dependent-type' SO tag is "Dependent types are types that depend on values." Perl 6 supports types that depend on values, so there's that.
For The edit summary for the change by Awwaiid that added Perl 6 to Wikipedia's page on Dependent Types says "Perl 6 ... has undecidable dependent types".
The Wikipedia page starts with:
a dependent type is a type whose definition depends on a value. A "pair of integers" is a type. A "pair of integers where the second is greater than the first" is a dependent type because of the dependence on the value.
Here's one way to create a type along those lines in Perl 6:
subset LessMorePair of Pair where { $_.key < $_.value }
subset MoreLessPair of Pair where { $_.key > $_.value }
multi sub foo ( Pair) { " P" }
multi sub foo (LessMorePair) { "LMP" }
multi sub foo (MoreLessPair) { "MLP" }
for 1 => 1, 1 => 2, 2 => 1 { say foo $_ }
# P
# LMP
# MLP
Does this mean the Perl 6 subset
feature generates dependent types? Perhaps this is what Awwaiid is thinking of.