Re: Calling symbol table patch

On Mon, 20 Nov 2000, Andi Gutmans wrote: > Andrei, > > The patch slows down the main function call opcode. I really don't like that. How much really does it slow it down? It's just putting a pointer on a stack before the actual call and taking it off afterwards. > Is it really that important? When did you bump into this need and why > couldn't you handle it with the existing functionality? I'm not quite clear > as to when in programming you *need* such functionality and can't write the > code in a different (IMO better) way. > But then again, you might have a very good reason because I don't know > when/how this need arose. It's impossible to implement some functionality without some sort of a patch like this. For example, I am working on a template engine, and I need to assign a variable to the template, and I got sick of typing something like this: $tpl->assign('foo', $foo); So, I wanted to speed it up and have a method that could take just names of the variables and assign them using their current values in the calling scope, like this: $tpl->batch_assign('foo', 'bar', 'color1'); But there is no way to get to calling scope: class Template { function batch_assign() { $args = func_get_args(); foreach ($args as $var_name) { /* Right here, we have no idea what $$var_name is in the * function that called us. */ } } } So, that's why I wanted that patch. -Andrei Nobody tried to design Windows - it just grew in random directions without any kind of thought behind it.