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Yes, and the processing overhead for an addition is about the same as for a square root extraction.

An "I'm feeling Lucky" on google over "smalltalk performance overhead" seems to provide a page with a simple micro-benchmark that refutes the "add" overhead example. Certainly it's not as fast as assembler, but comparing it to the cost of square rooting seems to be much. http://www.exept.de/sites/exept/onlineDoc/english/programming/STspeed.html DISCLAIMER: I'm no language expert, I have no real-world experience with Smalltalk, and I do not know the latest research in language performance/correctness/tradeoff issues (citeseer seems to provide many many links on this subject, though I haven't taken the time to wade through it). -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml