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Language Design
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| Date: | -- (:) |
| From: | David McClain <dmcclain@a...> |
| Subject: | Language Design |
John Max Skaller said: > I am designing a programming language (the compiler is written in ocaml) which is a procedural language with 'purely functional' expressions (using eager evaluation). Function closures can access their context, which procedural statements my change between building the closure and evaulating it. Procedural closures may mutate their environment. DM says: I, for one, have fought for many years with languages that insisted on a division between functions and procedures as you describe them. I have found the unified "everything is a function" approach to be most appealing. In particular, the worst offenders are those languages that insist on syntactic distinctions such as Fortran, RSI/IDL, and Basic. I cannot be alone in having difficulty remembering when a routine, whose result I don't really need, is to be called as a function, or as a procedure. I hope you find an answer to your question, but I do not look forward to another such language. Sincerely David McClain, Sr. Scientist, Raytheon Systems Co., Tucson, AZ