On Fri, Aug 18, 2000 at 09:57:59AM -0700, Larry Wall wrote:
> Because we don't lose much efficiency to polymorphism, since we need it
> anyway to support generic scalars, and we gain some efficiency whenever
> we procrastinate conversions out of existence.
Surely we do, because we have to add in something that says what
representation we're in and, if we're going for a vtable design, how to
transform it into anything else.
I agree that procastinated conversions are the way to go; this actually brings
up another interesting thought I had:
We can tell, for each evaluated block, from the optree which parts of each
variable are going to be used in that run. This means we can, for instance,
completely avoid using an SV if a variable is always treated as an NV no
matter what.
Does this buy us anything?
> : I still don't see the contradiction, incidentally.
>
> The very definition of an opaque type is that you only care about the
> interface, not the implementation.
Well, hmm. J Random Core Developer doesn't care about the implementation.
But someone's got to, else it doesn't get done.
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