why tags?

["John Belmonte" <jvb@...>]

Hello,

With recent mention of the designers meeting to discuss about what can
be removed from Lua in mind...

I've been studying Lua and I noticed that the concept of tags was not
present in the language at the time the SPE paper was written.  Is
there any information available on the designers' reasoning for adding
tags?

It seems like everything you can do with tags could have been done in
the original language by wrapping values in table "classes" and setting
the fallbacks to pass control to a handler function within the class. 
It would be less efficient but more monolithic than what tags provide. 
By monolithic I mean no arbitrary constraints such as "this method
cannot be set for tables with default tag" for the "gettable" event,
etc.

Regards,