Re: What is the future of Compiler technology?

Tommy Thorn wrote:
> Friedrich Dominicus wrote:
>
>>And it shows how Microsoft brainwashing works. Have you checked
>>Smalltalk it has full closures from it's beginning,
>
>
> No. In standard Smalltalk, blocks don't capture free variables. I'm
> not sure what happens with those when the block survives the creating
> context. Some commercial variants of Smalltalk have extended the block
> notion to be true closures.


Actually Standard Smalltalk _does_ have full closures. ANSI x3j20
(circa 1998) specifies full closures. Smalltalk-80, from circa 1982,
provided a rather strange scheme that did close over free variables but
did not allow recursive invocation.


In both systems blocks are "full upward funargs" in that they remain
valid, closing over free variables, after their enclosing execution
context has returned.




> Scheme, SML, O'Caml, Haskell, etc all had true closures from day one.
>
> I agree, attempts at shoehorning closures into languages originally
> designed without them have never been very successful.


--
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Eliot Miranda Smalltalk - Scene not herd

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