Re: New experimental GP parser release 2.4.1.bill-3

[Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse@ilyaz.org>]

On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 11:40:39PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
> The plan calls for a new PARI object the closure:
> 
> A closure C are t_VEC with two components: 
> gel(C, 1) is a t_VECSMALL ("bytecode")
> gel(C, 2) is a t_VEC      ("data")".
> 
> The quirk is that C[2] can contains closures as components, so
> this is recursive.
> 
> A closure is a perfectly standard GEN object and can be handled
> in the same way.

I do not think we want to have closures BEFORE the major problems with
dynamic variable lookup are well understood.

For the simplest case, consider

    ? f(x_y_z) = 11
    ? ?0

    f     x     x_y_z

Why did x_y_z jump into existence?  This variable should have no
visibility outside of f():

    ? x_y_z(ttt) = 44
      ***   unused characters: x_y_z(ttt)=44
				    ^--------

When one feels that semantic of variables is documented well enough,
one can ask for semantic of anonymous functions; IMO, not in the other
order.

Yours,
Ilya