I think there'll be two types of tie--tied variables (like Perl has already), and tied namespaces (as supposedly some people really need, though I don't fully know why). But even without the above pathological case: with tied namespaces, a namespace fetch potentially has unknown overhead, and a compiler can't know if re-fetching is better than spilling. But on the other hand, maybe that's just part of the deal with tied namespaces--they may be fetched from more often than the code would imply, so the tied namespace needs to be prepared for that.
I'm OK with going on record as saying that the pir code generator and optimizer make no guarantees on the number of times something is fetched out of a global namespace or lexical pad. If a language wants guarantees, it can emit absolute code and not leave it up to the register spilling algorithm to decide.
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Dan
--------------------------------------it's like this------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai [EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunk