>It might be worthy to point out that the both ideas have been
>implemented in Smalltalk for ages.
I think this is just a standard technique to speed up small objects a
little. Dynamic languages often distinguishes between "unboxed" and "boxed"
elements; I think the latter is the one that has an extra pointer. By
avoiding extra derefencing for small objects, one can also speed up a
little -- but then one has to go deeper into the Haskell enginge.
>Plus "double dispatching" for
>mixed type arithmetic.
I use a variation of "double dispatch" myself (in a C++ program I wrote)
where one can return function pointers as a replacement for the function
returning it.
But I do not think "double dispatch" has anything to do with the Int vs.
Integer question.
Hans Aberg
* Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
* Home Page: <http://www.matematik.su.se/~haberg/>
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