specializing generic methods

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

On 29/08/14 23:11, Dan Smith wrote:
> I'll observe that inference only does two things with an 'any' type variable (I think): i) leave it as a placeholder in a reference type that appears in a bound, and ii) equate it with an ivar.  With those constraints, I don't think there's anything you could do to manually specialize a well-typed invocation so that inference would make different choices.  Not absolutely sure, but I can't think of anything.
>
> (Restricting myself to non-overloaded methods, anyway.  Start overloading, and of course you can trigger different overload results with specialization.)
Thanks Dan,
this is kinda what I was looking for - I came up with similar examples 
as yours in the overloading scenario and primitive conversion - but I 
fully agree that we only get one shot at these kind of decisions - and 
that is at compile-time. So, I was mainly referring at cases where you 
specialize a well-typed invocation and you end up with something bad in 
a plain scenario - no overriding, no weird conversions, no 'any' 
type-variables bounds. I couldn't find any example that would break - I 
was curious if somebody else could think of some - glad that you seem to 
confirm this general way of thinking.

Maurizio