Talk:Tagged pointer

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[edit] Tagged pointers in OCaml

This article is rather C-specific. It doesn't cover how tags are used in functional languages at all. In Lisp, tags are pretty fundamental, so much so that often special hardware is used (eg. Lisp machines, SPARC). OCaml uses the least significant bit to tag the difference between pointers and integers. See here for an analysis of the (surprisingly minimal) performance impact: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2004/07/e86a25aa6c6a6a7d08dd7eb50cfd5d52.en.html Richard W.M. Jones 13:29, 3 December 2006 (UTC)