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About your [1] ... dynamic languages can support multimethods (i.e. method overloading on steroids) so I don't get how a dynamic language can't do overloading based on return type.

The difference between a static and a dynamic language would be when this dispatch is made (compile-time versus runtime).

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Overloading on return type is fundamentally impossible in dynamic languages, since they dispatch on values, and the return value can not be known before the function is called.

Well it's not impossible. You could run them all and then decide which result to use. :)

That doesn't work either, since then you will have more than one result. Which one will you dispatch on?

Presumably, you'll have some rules that determine which is the best match and then error if it's ambiguous - just like the static case

Oh come on, all you need to do is to (OPTIONALLY) tag the function with the return type.

And it's still a dynamic type system ;)

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