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European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming

ECOOP 2005: ECOOP 2005 - Object-Oriented Programming pp 337–361Cite as

Efficient Multimethods in a Single Dispatch Language

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 3586))

Abstract

Smalltalk-80 is a pure object-oriented language in which messages are dispatched according to the class of the receiver, or first argument, of a message. Object-oriented languages that support multimethods dispatch messages using all their arguments. While Smalltalk does not support multimethods, Smalltalk’s reflective facilities allow programmers to efficiently add them to the language. This paper explores several ways in which this can be done, and the relative efficiency of each. Moreover, this paper can be seen as a lens through which the design issues raised by multimethods, as well as by using metaobjects to build them, can be more closely examined.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 201 N. Goodwin, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Brian Foote & Ralph E. Johnson

  2. School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand

    James Noble

Authors
  1. Brian Foote
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  2. Ralph E. Johnson
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  3. James Noble
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Portland State University,  

    Andrew P. Black

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Foote, B., Johnson, R.E., Noble, J. (2005). Efficient Multimethods in a Single Dispatch Language. In: Black, A.P. (eds) ECOOP 2005 - Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3586. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11531142_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11531142_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-27992-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31725-8

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