Re: rethinking method calls with __mcall metamethod rather than __index/__call

[Daniel Silverstone <dsilvers@...>]

On Sat, 2009-06-13 at 16:25 -0400, David Manura wrote:
> An alternative, proposed for consideration, is to provide a new
> __mcall metamethod for method calls (a.k.a. message passing).  If
> __mcall is not provided, Lua would revert to the old behavior of
> consulting __index and __call instead.  The proxy example above would
> be reimplemented more cleanly as follows:

Aranha[1] uses __methindex to provide as closely compatible behaviour as
possible, but still offer separation of methods and members.

__mcall rather than __methindex would offer a minor speedup, but I
wouldn't have thought it would be much. How measurable is it?

Certainly I think it'd be nice to see the core Lua distribution make the
distinction between foo:bar() and foo.bar() at the metamethod level.

D.

-- 
Daniel Silverstone                         http://www.digital-scurf.org/
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