Multiple Dispatch

Ken Dickey kend0 at earthlink.net
Thu Jun 19 22:39:32 UTC 2003


> On Mon, 16 Jun 2003, Stephane Ducasse wrote:
> 
> > I worked with CLOS during 4 years and I did not find the advantage of
> > multi dispatch. 

My experience with CLOS is the opposite.  I have done separate aspect-like 
things with web protocols, UI, and compiler work and in each case found MD to 
give compact, useful solutions which would have been painful to do other ways 
(e.g. double dispatch).

>> Brian T Rice <water at tunes.org> wrote:
>>I really don't have a good feel for whether multiple dispatch would pay
>>its own way.  I would mildly vote to leave it out of a Smalltalk-like
>>langauge simply in order to stay true to Smalltalk's philosophy of
>>having a tiny number of orthogonal constructs, that allow you to write
>>anything without too much trouble.

It would be good to use MD to build useful things before declaring it  
un-orthogonal or too-complex.

You should check out Dave Simmons' SmallScript/S# -- a Smalltalk with 
multiple dispatch.  <href=http://www.smallscript.org>.

Cheers,
-KenD



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