Dec. 23, 2008
10:26 p.m.
Stéphane Ducasse writes:
I am just giving examples, this was discussed before.
Since arguments are exactly the same as temps, this is just something the compiler is enforcing on us. Being able to assign to arguments is extremely useful and makes code much easier to read. Almost all todays programming languages (C, C++, C#, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, ...) allow that.
I may be wrong but I imagine that this has some impact on the produced byte code and probably Jitted code too.
The bytecode doesn't know what's an argument or what's a temp. It's purely a Smalltalk to bytecode compiler convention. It'll have no impact on interpreted performance, and should have none when running JITed. Bryce