Re: Vectors as functions

[Seth Gordon <address@hidden>]

On Sat, 2003-08-16 at 16:41, mike@newhall.net wrote:
> 
>     Maybe not in the traditional sense of one set of always-available
> features that satisfies everybody; but I'm thinking of the crude but
> simple idea of simply disabling or enabling features on some scale,
> from procedure to project.  What wouldn't work about a language that
> allowed, for example, call/cc, dynamic binding, or any other feature
> to be turned on and off, in effect reshaping the language to the needs
> of the task at hand?  (Of course there's the small matter of publicly
> available libraries and what subset of features they would be written
> to, but that's a Real World problem and not relevant here :-).

I am reminded of Perl's $[ variable, which allows the programmer to set
the index of the first element of an array.  My impression is that even
among people who consider "there's more than one way to do it" one of
Perl's great features, $[ is considered a bad idea.

-- 
"Virtue has its own reward, but has no sale at the box office."  --Mae
West
// seth gordon // sethg@ropine.com // http://ropine.com/sethg/cv.html //