[self-interest] Re: Questions about Self

[David Ungar]

IMO, the biggest difference is the syntactic weight: "lambda" vs "[]". 

Yes, the lack of a non-local return prevents the use of closures for control structures in many languages. The "maybe" monoid is an interesting alternative that could be viewed as a partial workaround in functional languages. Exceptions, too, sorta.

I've not looked at Pony yet.

- David (from iPad, typos likely)

> On Jun 27, 2016, at 6:44 PM, James Noble kjx at mcs.vuw.ac.nz [self-interest] <self-interest at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> 
> Dave wrote: 
> > blocks are more basic than lambdas
> 
> The biggest difference is that lambda syntax (being functional) almost always expect an argument;
> a function with no arguments doesn't make any sense. Block syntax is optimised to work well in the no-argument case. 
> 
> > in Scheme cond is a primitive, even though it could have been done differently
> 
> the questions is whether you quote at definition side (Scheme) or use side (Smalltalk) 
> 
> Chris Double (hey two Kiwis in the same thread :-) wrote: 
> > This is how the Pony programming language treats closures. They are sugar for objects with an apply method:
> 
> yep, lots of langauges do that, incl. Java. The catch is: where does "return" return to? 
> 
> J
> 
> 
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