When Assembly Leaks Through

Paraphrasing Piers Cawley talking about why to give up Ruby for Perl (paraphrased):

This is assembly language for calling a function:

    push address of RETURN on stack
    push $argument on stack
    get address of FUNC
    goto FUNC
RETURN:
    pop return value off of stack

This is Perl 5 for calling a function:

func($argument);

That's all well and good. This is assembly language for entering a function:

    pop parameter from stack
    verify parameter type constraints
    ...

This is Perl 5 for entering a function:

sub func
{
    my $parameter = shift;
    die 'Wrong type' unless $parameter->isa( 'Whatever' );
    ...
}

... but wouldn't it be nice if:

sub func(Whatever $parameter) { ... }

(No new insight here, but directly prior to this talk, Damian Conway and I talked about how Perl 6 signatures simplify much, much more code than this simple example illustrates. Lots of code goes away.