CSC 4101 Chapter : Homework 3 Solutions
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1) we would simply pass the tree node as an argument to the multimethod. Here"s how this would work in brew (an extension of java i"m working on): generic void print(node); The generic function declaration tells the compiler to generate code for a multimethod dispatch instead of treating these print methods as overloaded. The multimethod dispatch mechanism would select the apropriate method at run time based on the run-time type of the argument in a similar manner as how virtual function dispatch works. In the design patterns literature there"s the visitor design pattern that explains how to achieve a similar effect without multimethods. Multimethod dispatch could be implemented in a similar manner as virtual function dispatch, i. e. , with a table lookup. In the case of the print method it would be a 1-dimensional table. In general, it would be an n-dimensional table for a function with n parameters. Another implementation would be for the compiler to generate an if-then-else chain.
