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lambda functions

lambda functions

Posted Dec 14, 2005 2:26 UTC (Wed) by pimlott (guest, #1535)
In reply to: lambda functions by ncm
Parent article: The Boost C++ Libraries

Ok, I took your previous post as anti-lambda and pro-everything-in-C++, which was clearly mistaken. I absolutely agree that a language should be built on a minimal set of primitives, but I strongly disagree that they need be close to the machine.

I'm not sure why you say that CONS implies garbage collection; there could be free-cons. Your suggestion that memory management should be in a library is plausible for many languages; however, GC seems to be required for pure (or mostly pure, as in ML) functional languages, so in these cases GC must be in the core. Funtional languages usually have special constructs or a library for manually managing memory, when required. "GC makes it impossible" seems extreme to me.

Re "sour grapes": In my experience, the industry is indeed doggedly conservative--every language decision I have seen has been based on familiarity, programmer availability, risk-aversion, or political acceptability, never on technical merit per se. Not that these are unfounded considerations, but all work against new languages. And I could as easily lampoon your Panglossian dismissal of historical contingency. "Worse is Better" argues that C won because it was easier to implement, and ran well on small machines, not because it was better. Is this implausible to you?

Re ITA: I was not aware that they relied heavily on non-LISP code; I'll have to look that up.


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lambda functions

Posted Dec 14, 2005 2:39 UTC (Wed) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link]

Funtional languages usually have special constructs or a library for manually managing memory, when required.
I take that back somewhat: They have ways to explicitly allocate, deallocate, and modify references, but they don't have ways to use your own allocator, so far as I know.


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