The proposed counter only has to be checked/updated when an entity expansion is entered/exited. That's not going to be a lot of overhead, given how rare entity boundaries are in typical data and how much other computation is involved in the expansion. I'd bet it's close to negligible... especially if it's count-down-and-compare-to-zero rather than count-up-and-compare-to-maximum, since "!=0" is a free result of subtraction in most architectures and a JIT compiler ought to be smart enough to recognize that opportunity.
______________________________________ Joe Kesselman / IBM Research --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
