On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 01:10, Larry Wall wrote: > On the other hand, in a language like Perl, it's easy to come up > with contexts that don't specify the type context as well as the user > might expect. Plus asking for your return context is not necessarily > going to be terribly efficient anyway if it has to chase up some stack > somewhere looking for the caller, so it's not a programming style we > particularly want to encourage anyway. > > Larry
How much of the overhead for method dispatch/return is or can be incurred at compile time? If call and return signatures are defined at compile time is it possible to eliminate switch code and/or jump tables as an optimumization? I have been studying PERL 5 core and modules to identify options and issues for meta-architectures and automated code generation. PERL 6 documents and discussion provide insight essential to effectively using PERL 5 and preparing for PERL 6. >From what I have learned attributes (handlers) and BEGIN/CHECK/AUTOLOAD blocks are part of the answer. They provide for building and manipulating the symbol table. What I have been searching for is a way of triming the control flow graph. Sorry if this is off topic or dated. I have recently return to developing in PERL struggling to catch up. The conceptual and concrete progress is awesome. david
