On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Frank Barknecht wrote:
The $-prefixes would really become scope indicators. $0-hello would access the local table $0 using the t_symbol "hello". This would *not* create a t_symbol "1000-hello" anymore.
Am I right to assume that this would still keep "passing $0" as abstraction argument a viable operation? I use this idiom immensly often to let abstractions access data local to their parents.
Yes, $1-hello will work as expected. In fact, everything will feel the same as now, except that all "1000-"-prefixed symbols will be deleted when the abstr.instance #1000 gets deleted. Then it's faster and cleaner to achieve that effect by using two levels of hashes instead of one, because else you have to scan *all* of the *big* table every time an abstr.instance is deleted (!).
(with two levels, deleting n abstr.instances takes O(n) instead of O(n*n)).
_____________________________________________________________________ Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montréal QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju