MethodDictionary
Last updated at 7:30 pm UTC on 19 January 2022
Subclass of Dictionary.
From the class comment:
I am just like a normal Dictionary, except that I am implemented differently. Each Class has an instance of MethodDictionary to hold the correspondence between selectors (names of methods) and methods themselves.
In a normal Dictionary, the instance variable 'array' holds an array of Associations. Since there are thousands of methods in the system, these Associations waste space.
Each MethodDictionary is a variable object, with the list of keys (selector Symbols) in the variable part of the instance. The variable 'array' holds the values, which are CompiledMethods.
Access
aClass methodDictionary
to get at the selectors (methods)
aClass methodDictionary keys
to access the source code of a method
aClass sourceCodeAt: aSelector
