Newsgroups: comp.lang.dylan
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From: davis@ilog.fr (Harley Davis)
Subject: Re: What's a generic function?
In-Reply-To: Patrick C. Beard's message of 18 Apr 1995 21:45:45 GMT
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References: <3mnrf2$288r@acs6.acs.ucalgary.ca> <HAAHR.95Apr18142420@netcom4.netcom.com>
	<3n0j5q$ggc@stc06.ctd.ornl.gov> <DAVIS.95Apr18161305@passy.ilog.fr>
	<3n1bu9$pfg@lll-winken.llnl.gov>
Date: 19 Apr 1995 09:09:57 GMT


In article <3n1bu9$pfg@lll-winken.llnl.gov> Patrick C. Beard <beard@cs.ucdavis.edu> writes:

   In article <DAVIS.95Apr18161305@passy.ilog.fr> Harley Davis, davis@ilog.fr writes:
   >I am astounded by the number of people who seem to think that it is
   >somehow to Dylan's advantage that programmers be unable to reliably
   >and portably predict the approximate cost of function calls in the
   >language.

   However, I would still argue that most of the time, the cost of a
   function call will be dominated by the function itself and not the
   dispatching.

If this is true, than why complicate the language with a sealing
mechanism whose primary virtue is supposed to be enabling this
optimization?  Apparently the Dylan designers do not agree with this
assessment.  I suspect most C++ programmers would not agree either.

-- Harley
-- 

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