Call vs Send

[Richard Gaskin]

Dick Kriesel wrote:
> On 6/9/05 6:23 PM, "Richard Gaskin" <ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Using "the long id of the target" will provide an absolute reference to
>>the specific object, but I'm not sure why simply "the target" doesn't
>>return the same value.  Hmmm....  makes "the target" rather less useful,
>>unless there's a benefit to the truncated descriptor it returns that I'm
>>just not seeing.
> 
> The truncated descriptor enables the simple structure "if the target is me"
> in handlers for system messages and even application messages.

That would still work if  both "the target" and "me" used absolute 
references.  Within scripts the engine seems to know what "the target" 
refers to, but looking at the string returned when asking for "the 
target" we should expect confusion if there are two such objects with 
the same name.

Curious inconsistency....

> What are the relative timings of handlers in the message path vs. handlers
> outside?

About twice as long, but as with many benchmarks with Transcript it 
hardly matters:  "twice as long" sounds like a big deal, but on my 1GHz 
G4 that's still less than a microsecond. :)

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
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