Efficient Multiple Dispatching Using Nested Transition-Arrays

Efficient implementation of multiple dispatching is critical with regard to the success of the multimethods, which are recognized as a powerful mechanism in object-oriented programming languages. However, the current known time-efficient approaches suffer of poor space efficiency. This paper presents a novel multiple dispatching approach that substantially improves the space efficiency over the known constant time lookup approaches. The approach we propose is applicable to a wide range of languages supporting locally or partially ordered multi-methods, both statically and dynamically typed.