Re: Reference to "First-Class Data Type"

spot@CS.CMU.EDU (Scott Draves)
Mon, 24 Feb 92 21:16:17 GMT

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Newsgroups: comp.compilers
From: spot@CS.CMU.EDU (Scott Draves)
In-Reply-To: eric@tfs.COM's message of 22 Feb 92 22:06:53 GMT
Keywords: types, design
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
References: 92-02-085 92-02-104
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 92 21:16:17 GMT

> On 22 Feb 92 22:06:53 GMT, eric@tfs.COM (Eric Smith) said:
john> In other languages with 1st class procedures, you can create
john> procedures, not just pointers to them, at run time.
Eric> So why not just put a C compiler in the C library? Call it with a
Eric> string of source code and have it return a function pointer.
Eric> Would that satisfy the definition of first class?


Not in a practical sense. Creating procedures in a higher order language
should be cheap enough that programmers can use it with impunity. The
above scheme is so expensive that it would never be used, except in
desperate circumstances.
--
Scott Draves, spot@cs.cmu.edu
--

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