Re: Vectors as functions

["Joe Marshall" <address@hidden>]

Funny you should mention that.....

I wrote the Rebol 1.0 interpreter.  (but left the company right afterwards)

Rebol is *extremely* difficult to compile in any meaningful sense.
Since the parse tree can change dynamically at runtime, there is
a combinatoric explosion of code paths.  You can constrain
things a bit by allowing the user to declare procedure arity, though.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James McCartney" <asynth@io.com>
To: "Joe Marshall" <jrm@ccs.neu.edu>
Cc: <ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu>
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 12:26
Subject: Re: Vectors as functions


> 
> On Monday, August 18, 2003, at 08:59 AM, Joe Marshall wrote:
> 
> >> I understand what is meant by dynamic and static binding. Or compile
> >> time or runtime lookup resolution. But what do you mean by 
> >> "syntactic"?
> >
> > First-class `macros' that you can re-define on the fly.
> 
> I think Rebol's "dialects" feature might be something like this. As I 
> understand it from reading their webpage, Rebol is interpreted, a 
> program is a list of tokens evaluated left to right, and a token, when 
> run, can decide how to interpret the remainder of the token stream.
> 
> -- 
> --- james mccartney
>