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From: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
Subject: Re: Q: access to subprogram
Date: 1996/07/06
Message-ID: <Du4tvx.13s@world.std.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 164031243
references: <4rb9dp$qe6@news1.delphi.com> <JSA.96Jul2221357@organon.com>
 <4re2ng$t7u@wdl1.wdl.loral.com> <dewar.836413642@schonberg>
organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-07-06T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <dewar.836413642@schonberg>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>(and just in case I give the wrong impression, I fully understand that
>full closures, preferably in conjunction with partial parametrization of
>higher order functions, lend tremendous expressive power -- for example
>Ackerman's function can be written using primitive recursion if you have
>these notions around), but I think the capability goes beyond the
>appropriate semantic level for Ada -- no doubt that statement should 
>set of a mini-thread :-)

OK, sounds like an interesting mini-thread to me.  :-)

Ignore efficiency and implementation difficulty, for the moment.  Show
me an example or two illustrating the tremendous expressive power, using
some imagined syntax for expressing full closures.  (I know there's some
expressive power there, but it's not clear to me how tremendous it is.
I'm wondering if I've just not had enough experience in Lisp, etc.  I've
done some Lisp programming, and used closures, but don't miss them *all*
that much in Ada-like languages.)

- Bob