Having our cake and eating it too

[Jon L White <JONL at MIT-MC>]

    Date: 18 April 1981 15:02-EST
    From: Richard C. Waters <DICK at MIT-AI>
    more of a question than a bug,  when calls to status and sstatus 
    are compiled, do they still have to parse the command name even 
    when this is known at compile time.
Yes, I'm afraid this is so -- QUUX started a system of multiple entries
to STATUS functions some years ago, so that the complr could just PUSHJ P,
to the right place, but we never finished this.  The question was one of
achieving a very small efficiency factor, versus a modestly large investment
of development time;  we preferred to develop other things, and at this point
in time, its hard to justify much more development-for-the-sake-of-speed on the
PDP10 MacLISP.
    A similar but more interesting question, re EXTENDS. . .  When this
    is the case everything could compile very effeciently, because you
    could find out at compile time what all of the methods were and
    everything, and save a great deal of searching around.  .  .  .
This point is certainly worth considering -- indeed SMALLTALK does this.
There is very little needed in the COMPLR in the form of "understanding"
declarations to make it happen.  THis problem will occur in NIL too, 
although the feeling of many persons is that the FLAVOR system has
such a small, albeit constant, time overhead that most persons won't care
to bother with declarations.