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From: rogoff@sccm.Stanford.EDU (Brian Rogoff)
Subject: Re: Q: access to subprogram
Date: 1996/07/24
Message-ID: <ROGOFF.96Jul24163007@sccm.Stanford.EDU>#1/1
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references: <4rb9dp$qe6@news1.delphi.com>
 <ROGOFF.96Jul22154757@sccm.Stanford.EDU>
organization: /u/rogoff/.organization
reply-to: rogoff@sccm.stanford.edu
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-07-24T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff) writes:
   Brian Rogoff <rogoff@sccm.stanford.edu> wrote:
   >.. I'm curious as to 
   >whether you find Pascal style iterators using downward funargs (there, I'm 
   >using Lisp terminology) superior to CLU/Sather-1.0 style iterators. 

   No.  When I was a Pascal programmer many years ago, I used
   procedures-as-params a lot for iterators.  But CLU iterators are clearly
   superior.  I don't know Sather, but from what I've read, they seem even
   more superior.

Yes, Sather iterators are a pleasure to use. There is a paper on the web page 
about their design, and I imagine it has been published by now. On the other 
hand, their integration into Ada would have been rather major, whereas the 
Pascal approach would probably have been easier.

   >...And 
   >how do the Ada 95 alternatives stack up?

   Not very well, I'm afraid.  You can use generics, but you end up with a
   lot of verbose junk for some simple things.  Sigh.

Ada generics are great, but it seems that they are (over)used to hide certain 
ugly little corners of the language (like jgv's mutually recursive types 
fix). I don't like using them for this. 

   >... Also, were these downward funargs 
   >widely used, or was there a small set of problems in which they were the ideal
   >vehicle of expression, like the multidimensioal integration example? 

   I'd say Pascal's downward "funargs" were widely used for iterators.  At
   least in the code I saw, and the code I wrote.

Anecdotal evidence, but useful. So when the feature was there, people used it 
a lot.

   Ada's generics can do *almost* everything that Pascal can do.  They
   can't recurse, in Ada, like they can in Pascal.  (I needed that once.)
   And they're verbose, as I said.

Do you feel that they are the right solution though? The generic approach to 
function composition looked ugly to me, whereas the direct approach looks 
beautiful. That may be subjective, but I don't think so. I bet even most of 
the people who argued against this feature in Ada would admit that for this 
problem, generics are kind of ugly.

   Smalltalk's version is pretty nice, by the way.  You don't pass
   procedures -- you pass blocks.  And that avoids the annoyance of having
   to name something that doesn't need or deserve a name -- it's just the
   Body_Of_The_Loop, or whatever.

Just like Scheme, which had anonymous and named lambda expressions. I suppose 
that in a future Ada, called Ada 0X rather than the plaintive sounding Ada 0Y, 
we could have anonymous downward funargs, as Richard O'Keefe suggested for 
Pascal.

   - Bob

   P.S. I was away for more than a week, so I may have missed some answers
   to my question about full closures.  Did anybody answer that?

Was this the "why are they any better than wrapping up the environment and 
func in a tagged type" question?

-- Brian