Re: Vectors as functions

[James McCartney <address@hidden>]

On Friday, August 15, 2003, at 12:29 PM, Joe Marshall wrote:

> The biggest problem with first-class environments ala MIT Scheme
> is the introduction of new bindings at runtime.  If you introduce a
> new binding, the `lexical address' (frame and offset) of a variable
> cannot be statically determined and you have to do a deep search
> every time.  It absolutely destroys any sort of compiler optimization.

Are programming language features only valuable that can be optimized?
For some problems optimization might not be as important as 
expressivity..

>
> If you went a tad further and allowed *syntactic* binding in
> first-class environments, you'd be truly hosed.

I understand what is meant by dynamic and static binding. Or compile 
time or runtime lookup resolution. But what do you mean by "syntactic"?

-- 
--- james mccartney


-- 
--- james mccartney   james@audiosynth.com   <http://www.audiosynth.com>
SuperCollider - a real time audio synthesis programming language for 
MacOS X.