At 23:29 +0100 2000.01.19, Marcel Weiher wrote:
[Nice comments about trampolines] Thanks ! (blush)
There have been some interesting comments in this thread about trampolines. This is a term that I have heard used, but I'm not sure exactly what it means. I wonder if Marcel or someone else could enlighten me (and others)?
For example, what is going on in
So, the way to multiply an array by 2 using standard trampoline-like messaging would be
#(1 2 3 4 5) collect * 2.
I'm guessing that #collect on an array returns a "trampoline" object with a reference to the specific array, and then this trampoline understands * and implements it by sending collect: [ :each | each * arg ] to that array.
But how is this implemented? Something more clever than one method in the trampoline for each arithmetic operator, I presume!
As another example, on 18:36 -0500 2000.01.19, Stephen Pair wrote:
I found the trampoline concept very useful...Marcel actually modified some asynchronous message code of mine to use his trampoline stuff. The original code was written like:
anObject asend: #message with: arg
...which was kind of cumbersome. With the trampoline, it simply became:
anObject asend message: arg.
...beautiful!
A agree, and I'm guessing that here the "trampoline" returned by (anObject asend) implements message: arg by doing something like
[myObject message: arg] fork
but, once again, I would like to see how this is implemented in a general way.
Incidentally, Marcel, I did look at your DiplomaThesis, and found it very interesting. It's a very nice survey of some things that I knew about and many others that I did not.