[objc-improvements] Just remembered something about multiple method signatures...

[Ziemowit Laski]

I just remembered a weird corner case that was really occurring in
Apple's code.  Namely, you had several conflicting method signatures,
one of which was returning 'void', while others were returning assorted
non-void values.  It just so happened that the 'void' guy was seen last,
and so the compiler happily plucked it from the hash table.  But this 
was
a wrong choice, resulting in a cascade of errors when we tried to assign
the result of the message dispatch.

At the time, my fix was to special case method dispatching:  If it was
determined that the return type should be 'void', substitute an 'id'
return type instead. :-)  Not pretty, but it worked.

I guess my point is that arbitrarily picking a signature out of a pool
of contenders is fraught with problems, and I still believe that
the IMP fallback is a cleaner solution in this case.  I don't think
doing this breaks (codegen-wise) the counterexample you guys keep
discussing (i.e., where all the candidate methods return 
NSComparisonResult),
does it?

--Zem
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Ziemowit Laski                 1 Infinite Loop, MS 301-2K
Mac OS X Compiler Group        Cupertino, CA USA  95014-2083
Apple Computer, Inc.           +1.408.974.6229  Fax .5477