27 Jan
2008
27 Jan
'08
5:37 a.m.
Derek Elkins wrote:
and you can have unboxed values in dynamically typed languages.
really? Sure that's possible as an optimization, but I thought that to explicitly specify that would require a known static type. Or perhaps the bit-"tagging" by which some Scheme implementations are able to hold small integers without a pointer (IIRC)? That's exactly what Ruby does - symbols, Fixnums (integers that fit into a single machine word), bools and nil are unboxed, distinguished from boxed types by the lowest 2 bits. That's undistinguishable at runtime,
Isaac Dupree wrote: though - everything Just Works as though they're ordinary objects, including flipping integer class to Bignum (which is boxed) as necessary. -- Alex