Aug. 1, 2001
4:03 a.m.
The vtable looks a lot like Python's type object. Is Perl's vtable an object in its own right?
Depends on your definition of object, I suppose. There is a mapping from the low-level bits the interpreter needs to interpreted-language level things--while the vtable won't actually be directly manipulatable at the HLL level, manipulating HLL constructs will alter the vtable, so it's effectively the same thing.
In Python, the type pointer really does point to a full-fledged object. Which probably means something quite different than it means in Perl. :-) --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)