J.Fine wrote:
> The overhead you point to is slight, and there are worse offenders (such as the LaTeX3 programming language itself).
> 
> I also suspect that if you do the tests I think you'll find
>   \expandafter\def\csname aa.bb\endcsname{A longish piece of text}
>   \def\mymacro #1{\csname #1.bb\endcsname
>   \mymacro{aa}
> will be quicker than
>   \mymacro{A longish piece of text}
> because of the reduced churning of tokens.  But I could be wrong.

I think that it's likely that dictionaries will be implemented using
data "packed" inside another variable, rather than as csnames. This
makes it easier to do things like "clear the dictionary" without needing
to know every entry type.

> Your revision of my
>     #1{name}
> to
>     \DictionaryLookup{#2}{name}
> I strongly disagree with.  You've taken something simple that works, and changed it to something that is broken (because it assumes that all maps will be dictionaries).

That will depend on how things are implemented, but I take your point.
Sorry about this.
--
Joseph Wright