>Jecel Assumpcao Jr <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote...

Great to hear from you , Jecel.

> > Lazy Activation
>
>I included a slightly related idea in a 4 bit Smalltalk:
>
>http://www.merlintec.com:8080/Hardware/dietST
>
>This had an "enter" bytecode for explicitly creating a new context and a
>"grabArg" bytecode from moving stuff from the sender's bytecode to the
>newly created one. The idea was that the compiler would generate the
>bytecodes for this as late in a method as possible (in the best cases -
>never). This was inspired by the Smalltalks that defer the creation of
>temporary variables until their first assignment. This static solution
>is not as powerful as your dynamic one, but it does have a few things in
>common.

Completely.  Yes, it's in interesting case in which the dynamic solution,
by virtue of more information, can do somewhat better.

>This project only got as far as a SmaCC compiler for these bytecodes in
>Squeak, so I never got any dynamic statistics for this;
>
>> Cloned Activation
>
>This is what I did in NeoLogo:
>
>http://www.merlintec.com/pegasus2000/e_neologo.html
>
>NeoLogo was just a paper design but this feature was also present in the
>"SuperLogo" which I implemented in 1983 in TI99/4A Extended BASIC. It
>worked great and actually makes the run time simpler at the cost of
>slightly complicating the parser.

Cool.

>Self actually explains method
>activation in this way to the users (though the implementation is
>radically different) because it is easier to understand than the
>traditional schemes.

Yes.  I've been talking with Dave about Self recently , and if may be that this was tickling my brain cells at the time.

	- Dan