I'm not exactly sure what we would expect primitives to speed up here.

General iteration loops are of the form
from index =start to stop
fetch a value from self according to index
evaluate a block with that value
return to top.

Evaluating the block will be done in the normal manner - it will still
consist of bytecodes and so only the peripheral part can be
'optimized'. For really simple blocks it might possibly work out to be
a small speed up since the indexing and value fetching will be a large
part but for general blocks I'd expect the evaluation time to be the
significant part.

Can anyone explain the VA primitive mentioned?


tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- Went to the dentist to have his cranial cavity filled.