Re: Sather: templates necessary?

[Eray Ozkural]

Keith Hopper wrote:
> 
> In article <address@hidden>,
>    Eray Ozkural <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > I'm not suggesting that Sather should adopt it but there
> > is an intriguing relationship between generic code and mult. polymorphism.
> 
>     I wouldn't have said it was particuarly intriguing - rather  it is of
> the same nature.  I do agree with you about the efficiency problem.  Our
> prototype assembler generating Sather compiler has managed to reduce the
> size of dispatch tables fairly radically - although we have not directly
> tackled mutliple dispatch in Sather.  I do have a colleague who is very
> interested in this sort of thing!

If there's a semantic equivalence, then we might say it is of the same nature.
I think such equivalence would point out that either one of these constructs
is redundant [genericity or mult. polymorphism] or they are both faulty; as
it seems to me that the way they're used are quite different. This is a subject
to dispute, though. I can't make up my mind very lucid on this one.

In other words, a different language design could subsume both of these
features. Any comments?

Thanks,

-- 
Eray (exa) Ozkural
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
e-mail: address@hidden
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo