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Postings from September 2001
Damian Conway wrote: > Ken wrote: > > The one thing I'm curious about is whether different syntactic > > conventions affect the dispatcher or whether this is all just > > sugar for a single dispatch. > > Multiple dispatch is certainly not (practically) implementable via single > dispatch. Oops. I meant "sugar for one implementation of dispatch." We could eliminate single dispatch and *only* use multi-dispatch. The ":multi" attribute would just turn off the default behavior of replacing an existing function. > The only internal difference is that the first version has to do the > normal Perl single dispatch look-up before it discovers that Right. What if there wasn't a single dispatcher? I think multi dispatch could eliminate single dispatch if we looked for function matches in the current lexical scope *and* in the @ISA packages for every argument. Multi-dispatch is just as fast as single dispatch if only a single function matches. The compiler could easily keep track of this. - KenThread Previous | Thread Next