Multi-method dispatching
Paolo Ferragina, S. Muthukrishnan, Mark de Berg · 1999
IntroductionCurrent object oriented programming languages (OOPLs) rely on mono-method dispatching.Recent research has identified multi-methods as a new, powerful feature to be added to OOPLs, and several experimental OOPLs now have multi-methods.Their ultimate success and impact in practice depends, among other things, on whether multimethod dispatching can be supported efficiently.We show that the multi-method dispatching problem can be transformed to a geometric problem on multi-dimensional integer grids, for which we then develop a data structure that uses near-linear space and has log-logarithmic query time.This gives a solution whose performance almost matches that of the best known algorithm for mono-method dispatching.