At 04:15 PM 2/7/2001 -0200, Branden wrote:
>David Mitchell wrote:
> >
> > Well, many of the vtable methods are operator-ish rather than value-ish,
> > presumably on the grounds of efficiency. A pure 'value' vtable wouldnt
> > have add(), concatenate() etc. Whihc leads me back to: I'm not sure
> > whether you are in favour of, or oppose, += etc being vtable methods.
> >
>
>Oppose. (Actually I'm talking about my idea on vtables, i.e. separate +/-/*
>in one vtable and store/fetch in another). My proposal on ++ and -- would be
>having the `value'-part of the vtable (the one that handles +/-/*) return a
>value corresponding to what would be the value of it after an increment or
>decrement. store would be used to actually commit the ++/-- operation. This
>would serve both postfix and prefix cases, because in one case the value
>before the store would be used, and in the other the one after.
Splitting the vtable into two pieces, with one piece not tied to a PMC,
makes some things impossible. Consider this:
@foo = @bar * @baz;
where all three arrays are really matrix types. In the separate load/store
and do vtable scheme it means you get the value of @bar and @baz in scalar
context, and multiply the results. Two operations, and the resultant values
are sanitzed. In the single vtable scheme, we'd execute @bar's multiply
routine, which would be clever enough (because we wrote it that way) to see
the second parameter's also a matrix, and do matrix math.
Splitting things up also loses information when moving data between the two
vtables routines. While that's not a big deal generally (as the info lost
is irrelevant) it forbids some rather interesting side cases.
>(I just reminded the C++ overloading of ++, that uses a dummy parameter to
>tell if it's a pre or a post increment. So bad...)
I'm not sure it's worth having both a preinc and postinc operator, as
opposed to splitting it into an inc/fetch or fetch/inc pair. (And yes, I
know, earlier I was arguing that one opcode's better than two. This one's
rare enough that profiling it would probably be in order...)
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
