At 03:06 PM 9/1/2001 -0400, Michael G Schwern wrote:
>On Sat, Sep 01, 2001 at 01:10:58PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> > At 10:03 PM 8/30/2001 -0400, Michael G Schwern wrote:
> > >Thinking about what Zhang was saying about multiple-dispatch not being
> > >inherently OO. I think he's sort of right. Multiple-dispatch need
> > >not be confined to method lookups.
> >
> > There is the potential for a pretty significant cost to this, since we'd
> > need to evaluate the args at runtime for each call. (Possibly we could do
> > some compile time optimization, but not in a lot of places, alas)
>
>Hmmmm.... shouldn't be any worse than a multi-method call. And it'll
>only effect those functions with the 'multi' flag.
Nope, the cost will be paid on all sub calls. We at least need to check on
every sub call to see if there are multiple versions of the functions. (We
can't tell at compile time if it's a single or multi-method sub call, since
it can change at runtime) Granted, it's not a huge expense for
non-multi-method calls, but it does still impose an overhead everywhere.
Dan
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