Re: Looking for Ada Technique Name and References

[Charles Hixson <charleshixsn@earthlink.net>]

Sorry, my point was that there was a "hierarchy" of languages.  I was
ranking them (approximately) by decreasing amount of support for
functional constructs. (Not clear, I realize, as I only gave three
examples, and C [or C++] really is about on a par with Ada.)  But there
are several different languages that give different degrees of support.
Even the various dialects of Lisp range from the purely functional (i.e.,
where all constructs can be phrased as a functional call with sugar around
it) to Common Lisp.  And none of these are what I now think of as the
functional languages:  ML, OCaML, etc.

Jon S Anthony wrote:

> > And since C supports pointers to functions, I suppose that
> > one could implement it in C.  And speaking of pointers to functions,
> > doesn't Ada95 ...
>
> Depends on what you mean.  In any of these you need to hack a lot
> of support - to make it really "right" you probably end up
> hacking a lot of the implementation of some functional language.
>
> In particular, none of the above supports closures (to have closures
> you really need GC) and certainly not Lisp like macros (where you
> can make compile time versions of such compositions).
>
> /Jon
>
> --
> Jon Anthony
> Synquiry Technologies, Ltd. Belmont, MA 02478, 617.484.3383
> "Nightmares - Ha!  The way my life's been going lately,
>  Who'd notice?"  -- Londo Mollari