Multiple-Dispatching Based on Automata

We present a novel technique for multiple-dispatching. In object-oriented programming languages, multiple-dispatching provides increased expressive power over single-dispatching by guiding method lookup using the values of all arguments instead of the receiver only. However, the efficient implementation for multiple-dispatching is still critical with regard to its success as a standard. There have been several time-efficient dispatching techniques proposed, but they are very space consuming. In this paper, we transform multiple-dispatching into a lookup automaton problem. Analysis and experiments show that our approach is space-efficient while providing the same time-efficiency as the previous known techniques. Moreover, we present a technique to further minimize the space-complexity of lookup automata.