RE: Should MY:: be a real symbol table?

[Dan Sugalski]

At 05:30 PM 9/3/2001 -0700, Brent Dax wrote:
>As far as expensiveness, I think this can be just as fast as our current
>offset-into-the-pad method.

I was speaking in both speed and memory use when I was talking about 
expense. We'd need to maintain a hash structure for each pad, plus we'd 
need to either design the hash structure such that it didn't need absolute 
addresses (so we could build it at compile time, which could be a long time 
before runtime with a disk freeze or two and an FTP in the interim), or 
we'd need to patch the addresses up at runtime when we allocated a new pad.

I'm not convinced the memory usage, and corresponding time to clone and/or 
set up the hash-based pad, is worth the relatively infrequent by-name 
access to variables in the pad. I could be wrong, though. We'll have to try 
it and see. (Shouldn't affect the bytecode, however, so we can try 
different methods and benchmark them as need be)

                                        Dan

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