A significant portion of functions look something like this:

define remotefile(source, mode, owner) {
   file { $name:
      source => "puppet://puppet/module/$source",
      mode => $mode,
      owner => $owner,
   }
}

Notice that it just wraps another type, adding a bit of information. It'd be great to have a simple language construct that supported this smoothly, so we didn't have to respecify every attribute supported by the object type (notice particularly that most attributes are *not* overridden). It seems almost like it should be a subclass of an existing type, using something akin to ruby's "super" function:

define remotefile(source) inherits file {
  super {
     source => "puppet://puppet/module/$source"
  }
}

This provides the needed functionality and is relatively straightforward in concept.