Re: Lightweight Languages Workshop (DDJ Article)

["Scott McKay" <address@hidden>]

"Eric Kidd" <eric.kidd@pobox.com> wrote in message
news:200201160037.TAA29849@life.ai.mit.edu...
> On Tue, 2002-01-15 at 07:47, Rob Myers wrote:
> > IIRC this isn't the case with modern Lisp if-you-know-what-you're-doing,
> > but it is made explicit with Dylan's type constraints and sealed/open
> > dynamism control. Fun-Dev's optimization syntax colouring makes this
> > easy to learn and manage.
>
> Dylan still has a number of primitive operations with hard-to-predict
> timing behaviors.  Method dispatch requires O(n log n) time for n
> methods with simple argument types, and even greater time for (say)
> type-unions of limited integer types.

"Virtual" method dispatch in any language that supports it has the
same performance, though -- C++ and Java, e.g.

And 'n log n' is pretty small when, even in large programs, n probably
averages around 2.  (I'm guessing at that number, but I'll bet you a
beer I'm not off by more than one.)