Where should the type information be 154

Now, you are thinking in terms of implementation rather than function! No, I am being FAR more radical than that. Let me give you the WHY, and examples.

I first thought of this in the context of a really radical statistical analysis and data handling package that would be able to handle the complex data common in the social sciences. I was going to allow an extensible definition of data types that would handle structured data, including items with an arbitrary number of sub-fields. Consider:

Joe Doe m. Mary Muffin 1 Jan 1499 son Richard 5th Feb 1499 d. Mary 8 Mar 1450 ...

but also allowing alternative formulations, such as income:

5 pounds 6 shillings 3 d 3 farthings 15 bushels of wheat the living of Lesser Twitching

The second time was in the context of a compilable command language, such as the Phoenix one and a fair number of less flexible ones on various mainframes. But my design was intended to be dynamically extensible and to have fewer restrictions. For example:

COPY fred, joe AND bill TO bert COPY fred EXCLUSIVE TO alf AND :tape:93 ASYNCHRONOUSLY

Regards, Nick Maclaren.