Proposal: Unify cells and steppers

[Benja Fallenstein <b.fallenstein@xxxxxx>]

Whoops-- now I've found my earlier mail! ;-)
-b.


Hi!

Regarding the plans of moving towards using Steppers instead of Cells. A Cell 
is an immutable object representing a single cell. A Stepper is a mutable 
object that represents a cell at any given time, but that can be moved across 
cells. Using Steppers may ease the task of compiling optimized code.

(Note: We're talking about Java objects here, not about in-ZZ objects. This 
is a completely technical issue.)

I do think that Steppers have applicability even now, even though I don't 
think we should go into compiling just yet (see my other mail): We create too 
many Cell objects, especially Cell objects that represent single characters 
on a vstream.

Currently, Steppers are black-box objects intended to allow implementations 
to supply their own fields. I propose to give them the same fields that Cells 
have, instead. The set of fields in Cell is optimized for vstream cells, 
which are our main concern for now, and to a lesser degree for cells in 
slices, which are our lesser concern for now.

Making Steppers have the same fields would allow easy interoperation with 
Cells. Specifically, it would be trivial to set a Stepper to a Cell by simply 
copying the fields. It would also be possible to set a Stepper to the 
position of another Stepper, by copying its fields (as the fields in a 
Stepper would be known). It would be possible to have efficient Dim 
implementations know about the fields in a Stepper, modifying them. It would 
mean that Steppers would not have to do classcasts on black-box StepperDims 
(instead, the normal Dims could be used).

To create Dims making efficient use of this, we would probably need to create 
our own implementation of hashtables; on the other hand, it might also be 
possible to extend the current PlainVStreamDim to handle vstream cells 
efficiently without going to that length, though on the other hand, the 
result may be more twisted than if we just implemented the custom hashtables.

- Benja