Re: Optimizations for Objects

[Zellyn Hunter]

Might be worth looking at Smalltalk papers too - they've been doing objects 
forever.  If I remember correctly, some smalltalks have an interesting form 
of caching: they call the last thing the call resolved to, and redispatch as 
necessary.  So rather than looking things up before every call, you make the 
same call as last time, and the called routine does:

a) are we supposed to be here? (presumed to be cheaper)
b) if not, redispatch and re-cache (presumed to be more expensive)
c) main method body

I'm not sure if that's apropos, but I thought it was quite clever when I first 
read about it.  Searching the web for [smalltalk cache] pulls up some 
interesting info and discussions.

Zellyn

Re: Dates and Times

[Zellyn Hunter]

For those of you not up to speed on how much date and time confusion there is, 
I remember this article by Dave Rolsky as being interesting:

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/03/13/datetime.html

Re: Parrot Z-machine

[Zellyn Hunter]

On Tuesday 02 September 2003 13:09, Amir Karger wrote:
 A couple more questions on the coding front:

 (1) Even though it's supposed to be native Parrot support, I'm still
 allowed to write in PIR, right? Because that'll be translated to pasm
 and thereby be native.

 (2) WinFrotz, one of the popular C Z-machine runtimes, is GPL. If I
 steal code or ideas from there, does Parrot or this piece of it have to
 be GPL only instead of GPL/Artistic? I am happily ignorant about
 licensing issues.

So I take it the goal is to to teach parrot to understand z-machine opcodes, 
rather than simply writing a z-machine interpreter that runs on parrot, or 
rewriting inform to compile to parrot?

I'm sure it's much harder that way (especially since I'm sure someone's going 
to follow the dotGnu lead and implement C for parrot before we're all said 
and done and you could just recompile one of the more portable z-machine 
emulators!), but you'd certainly get mad geek respect.  And since there's 
already a scheme implementation for z-code, you'd kill two birds with one - 
er, parrot.

Zellyn