well, Efficient "message dispatch" is of paramount importance in object-oriented languages. This is because message dispatch is a very frequent operation in object oriented programs and is performed at runtime; therefore, it should be as fast as possible. Message dispatch, however, is far from being a trivial operation. Unlike procedural programming languages (e.g., the C programming language) that can determine a function's address before runtime, object-oriented languages must determine the method that handles a message that has been dispatched to a receiver object at runtime, and it may involve an extensive search. That's why Object-oriented systems must implement message dispatch efficiently (rather than considering function call) in order not to penalize the OOP style.
Answered by
Romi
, an ibibo Master,
at
8:45 PM on July 20, 2008