🚀 go-pugleaf

According to rfg@NCD.COM (Ron Guilmette):
>... retrieving (or receiving) an hunk of data which represents the
>previous contents of some unknown type of thing requires us to use
>some sort of agreed upon scheme whereby the transmitter sends some
>unique code with the data block to indicate to the receiver what
>type of C++ object the transmitted data came from.

In my mind, the only reasonable choice for such a unique code is the
class name itself.  The C++ language depends on name equivalence, so
user code may also depend on name equivalence without problems.

>The [messaging] kernel then had to do a lookup of the class name string
>within a table of all class-name string known to the system in order to
>get a globally unique 32-bit integer valued "code" for that particular
>class type.

Why not use the class name itself?

>A much cleaner solution would have been to enlist the compiler & linker
>to assign the globally unique "type codes" up front, prior to run-time.
>This would have allowed us to avoid the (very expensive) table lookups
>which we did within the kernel for each transmitted message.

A string lookup though a set of strings fixed at compile time needs to
be rewritten if it is "very expensive."
-- 
Chip Salzenberg at Teltronics/TCT     <chip@tct.uucp>, <uunet!pdn!tct!chip>
   "All this is conjecture of course, since I *only* post in the nude.
    Nothing comes between me and my t.b.  Nothing."   -- Bill Coderre