Efficient Dynamic Look-Up Strategy for Multi-Methods

In object-oriented programming languages, multiple dispatching provides increased expressive power over single dispatching by guiding method lookup using the values of all arguments instead of the receiver only. There have been several programming languages supporting this mechanism and they demonstrate its usefulness. However, efficient implementation of multi-methods is critical with regard to its success as a standard. In this paper, we present a new mechanism for implementing multi-methods dynamic lookup based on automaton techniques. Analysis and experimental results show that our strategy is time and space efficient. The presented result can provide the basis for designing new object-oriented paradigms based on multi-methods.