Abstract

Current object oriented programming languages (OOPLs) rely on mono-method dispatching. Recent research has identified multi-methods as a new, powerful feature to be added to OOPLs, and several experimental OOPLs now have multi-methods. Their ultimate success and impact in practice depends, among other things, on whether multi-method dispatching can be supported efficiently. We show that the multi-method dispatching problem can be transformed to a geometric problem on multi-dimensional integer grids, for which we then develop a data structure that uses near-linear space and has O(log log n) query time. This gives a solution whose performance almost matches that of the best known algorithm for standard mono-method dispatching. Our geometric data structure has other applications as well, namely in two string matching problems: matching multiple rectangular patterns against a rectangular query text, and approximate dictionary matching with edit distance at most one. Our results f...

Citations