Early binding as an option

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 5:46 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>        Horrors... That looks like some MUF code I've seen (I never had a
> MUF flag on my old characters, so had no privilege to write in MUF --
> MPI was available to all, and even it had some links to MUF operations
> using similar magic numbers).
>

Hehe. I didn't mean that it should be thus in the source code, but
that some simple notation would tell the interpreter that it can make
that translation in memory - at the tokenization stage, or perhaps
when the function is invoked. The idea is that the interpreter can
skip one step - the step of taking the name "len", looking it up, and
finding the object <built-in function len> that it represents. It can
do that part of the work once, and patch in the function's address
somewhere as a special token - right into the tokenized source code.

Parenthesis: Reading the Wikipedia article on MUF shows that it has a
number of similarities to what I do today in coding my MUD - I have an
extremely rudimentary editor interface (smart editing is done on the
client), submit my code to the server, compile it, and invoke it - and
it's governed by permissions bits. However, I use a rather better
language than MUF :)

ChrisA