Re: Language design question

hannah@mamba.pond.sub.org (Hannah Schroeter)
21 Mar 2000 23:43:09 -0500

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[4 earlier articles]
Re: Language design question mkg@lanl.gov (2000-02-16)
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Re: Language design question kst@cts.com (Keith Thompson) (2000-02-19)
Re: Language design question thp@roam-thp2.cs.ucr.edu (Tom Payne) (2000-02-19)
Re: Language design question Andrew.Walker@nottingham.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker) (2000-02-27)
Re: Language design question hannah@mamba.pond.sub.org (2000-03-21)
Re: Language design question frederic_guerin@yahoo.com (Frederic) (2000-03-25)
Re: Language design question world!bobduff@uunet.uu.net (Robert A Duff) (2000-03-25)
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From: hannah@mamba.pond.sub.org (Hannah Schroeter)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 21 Mar 2000 23:43:09 -0500
Organization: Chaos
References: 00-02-065 00-02-066 00-02-140
Keywords: design, types

Hello!


Dr A. N. Walker <Andrew.Walker@nottingham.ac.uk> wrote:
>[Does anyone still use Bliss? It really did require explicit deferencing
>everywhere. What a pain in the neck. -John]


But it doesn't have to be a pain in the neck. Just consider ML for
contrast. As it's a (mostly) functional language, it has pure values
(no mutation, thus no dereferences needed) and variables (called
references in ML) which are initialized on creation (val ref : 'a ->
'a ref) and are retrieved with an explicit dereference operator (val
(!) : 'a ref -> 'a) and written with a special assignment operator
(val (:=) : 'a ref -> 'a -> unit). As you use references only when you
need imperative mutation, the program is usually not very cluttered
with dereferences/assignments.


Regards, Hannah.


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