From: Tom Pollard <tomp@...>
Date: 2006-12-20T04:23:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Discovering the number of return arguments requested.

On Dec 19, 2006, at 10:50 AM, Brad Phelan wrote:
> I'm only curious about this due to performance issues
> not interface issues.
[...]
> In the case of Markaby I suspect there would be some
> performance increase ( small maybe ) by changing the
> Markaby code to do something different if it knew
> beforehand that the fragment object was never required
> instead of generating one and giving it straight to
> the garbage collector.

If the fragment is simply a pointer into a larger structure, then  
there might not be any significant penalty at all in providing it.   
If it does need to be constructed, then perhaps it could be provided  
in a lazy manner?

One of the things I really like about Ruby is that accessors look  
just like attribute lookup.  This makes it possible to change your  
mind about whether an object attribute is just a value, or is  
calculated on demand, without changing your object's interface.

TomP