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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: classes and attributes
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Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2002 02:24:06 GMT
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Dan Schmidt  <dfan@harmonixmusic.com> wrote:
>buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett) writes:
>
>| L. Ross Raszewski <lraszewski@loyola.edu> wrote:
>| >Yeah. THere's always been some debate over whether it's a worthwhile
>| >distinction. Basically it comes down to us because there are technical
>| >reasons that it's desirable to have certain boolean instance variables
>| >represented differently at the VM layer.
>|
>| There are *debatable* technical reasons.
>
>Yeah, but the Z-Machine is made so that N boolean bits are already
>associated with each object (as well as instructions for accessing
>them).  So we might as well use them.

Sure, but that's not "there are technical reasons it's desirable
to have [them] represented differently at the VM layer." I don't
believe there really are such reasons.

But this is a pretty pointless argument. I was just documenting
the size issue because I ran into while designing a VM and thought
I'd point out the tradeoffs for future VM designers.

SeanB
