Re: Looking for Ada Technique Name and References

[Jon S Anthony <jsa@synquiry.com>]

Brian Rogoff wrote:
> 
> Well, the topic has really changed, but if you are going to rank languages
> based on their support for the functional programming paradigm, I'd give
> Ada a fairly significant edge over C and C++ since

Agreed.

> (1) Ada is lexically scoped

??? Surely you don't mean to imply that C/C++ are dynamically scoped?


> (2) Ada allows the use of nested subprograms as subprogram parameters to
>     generic instantiations, allowing the crude simulation of downward
>     funargs.

Agreed, but this is very crude indeed.


> In my experience, this captures some small amount of FP style directly
> which is awful in C and unpleasant in C++ (where you can overload "()"
> and explicitly pass local state rather than directly referencing variables
> from an enclosing scope).

I'm still not clear on why you think this means that C/C++ are not
lexically
scoped (or perhaps "less lexically scoped" than Ada).  Certainly passing
local state around does not impact this.  I agree that there are cases
where
you _have_ to do this when a lexically scoped access is what you really
want.


>Re: On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Charles Hixson wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I don't want to start a FP language war in c.l.ada, but why do you
> consider "Pure Lisp", ML and OCaml functional, Common Lisp not? I use
> references, arrays, and exceptions in my OCaml code...

Good question; direct support for iteration?  Then again, he seems to
exclude
Scheme as well.  Shrug.

/Jon

-- 
Jon Anthony
Synquiry Technologies, Ltd. Belmont, MA 02478, 617.484.3383
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