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Re: What is the purpose of static typing?

On Thursday, July 25, 2002, at 09:53 , Marcel Weiher wrote:

No. The code for dealing with return types is at the call-site, the object has no control over it. It also has no actual knowledge of it, because the selector it gets passed doesn't contain any type-information,
at least not in Apple's Objective-C.

On Thursday, July 25, 2002, at 05:31 Uhr, email@hidden wrote:

The object can always use introspection to choose the right method though (this doesn't really correspond with your example).

Well, he is right, in a sense. The compiler just *might* compile the message passing into a very complicated code of

- getting the actual signature of the given selector with the given object;
- storing arguments at stack appropriately (using a very complicated code with many ifs).

That is, *THEORETICALLY*. In practice it would be *EXTREMELY* complicated (taking into account things like value struct arguments / return types, or first-responder sending, whoa!), and I fear that the result would be utterly unuseable, mainly for efficiency reasons. Nevertheless, in plain theory, it still could be done.
---
Ondra Cada
OCSoftware: email@hidden http://www.ocs.cz
private email@hidden http://www.ocs.cz/oc
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 >Re: What is the purpose of static typing? (From: Marcel Weiher <email@hidden>)



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