Can a static library do better type checking? In particular can it figure out, at compile time, if there are no applicable methods or no unambiguous method?
That's not meaningful if you want to allow dynamic loading to extend the multi-method family. The dispatch mechanism I used is not as fast as virtual function call for a single "virtual" argument, but it is only a (largish) constant factor off. In a compiler implementation that factor could be reduced fairly close to one as far as I have planned. For more than one "virtual" argument the dispatch cost increases, but not a lot -- it should be linear or close to it for many common usage patterns. Lassi -- People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid. --Kierkegaard