bice@hbo.UUCP (Brent A. Bice) (03/17/90)
I've been wondering what /InstanceVarExtra is for. I saw this variable in the LiteWindow subclass, but as far as I can tell, it's not used for anything. Does anyone know what this variable is for if anything? Oh, by the by, I'm running NeWS ver 1.1. Thanks. Brent Bice Applied Computing Systems 2075 Trinity Drive Suite Lower Level Los Alamos, NM 87544 (505) 662-3309 bice@atlantis.ees.anl.gov
rxb@ASC.SLB.COM (Rafael Bracho) (03/20/90)
If I remember correctly (this is no longer true in NeWS 2.0), Object, in class.ps, adds InstanceVarExtra to the number of instance variables for a particular class, to obtain the size of the instance's dictionary. If you set InstanceVarExtra to zero, all attempts to 'def' a new variable in an instance will fail, with a 'dictfull' error. Given that the initial size of the dictionary is just a hint to the hashing function in NeWS (i.e., no space is actually allocated), there is no reason to make InstanceVarExtra small (other than wanting such errors to indicate unwanted definitions). -Rafael