Re: What is the purpose of static typing?
Re: What is the purpose of static typing?
- Subject: Re: What is the purpose of static typing?
- From: Ondra Cada <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 16:36:26 +0200
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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