FORTH and Hypercard

[Mark Wieder]

Jacque-

Monday, October 17, 2005, 10:35:14 AM, you wrote:

> True, though knowing Scott Raney he wouldn't change it even now.

There shouldn't really be much of a speed difference - the way this is
usually handled is you create a hash table with the overloaded
functions. If there's a match in the hash table then you process it
locally, otherwise you move right on to the builtins. So the only hit
you take is in a quick lookup in the hash table. It's a direct lookup,
it's either there or it isn't, and it's compiled and optimized. Should
actually take less overhead than a scripted function call.

I sense an inherent incompatibility between the folks who want more
speed out of the basic engine calls (arrays and such) and the folks
who want the flexibility of overloading the builtin functions. I fall
more in the latter category, but not enough to want things to change
(and possibly break existing behavior).

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net