Multiple‐Dispatching Based on Automata
Weimin Chen, Volker Turau · Theory and Practice of Object Systems · 1995
We present a novel technique for multiple‐dispatching. In object‐oriented programming languages, multiple‐dispatching provides increased expressive power over single‐dispatching by guiding method lookup using the values of all arguments instead of the receiver only. However, the efficient implementation for multiple‐dispatching is still critical with regard to its success as a standard. There have been several time‐efficient dispatching techniques proposed, but they are very space consuming. In this article, we transform multiple‐dispatching into a lookup automaton problem. Analysis and experiments show that our approach is space‐efficient while providing the same time‐efficiency as the previous known techniques. Moreover, we present a technique to further minimize the space‐complexity of lookup automata.