2 ms·
I know well what a FEXPR is (I was a Maclisp maintainer) but they are special forms. It is interesting to imagine inverting the sense of execution, but as you
by gumby 3y ago
I know well what a FEXPR is (I was a Maclisp maintainer) but they are special forms.
It is interesting to imagine inverting the sense of execution, but as you say it's hard to do much optimization.
- samatman 3y agoThey're special forms in a language where functions are something which eagerly evaluates its arguments. In a language where functions don't do that, they're just functions. Rye appears to be one of those languages. One could quibble about whether that's the right thing to call them, but if we say they're vau or whatever, "everything in Rye is a vau" is still true. I think calling them functions is reasonable though.
- sparkie 3y agoIn Kernel, we could argue that operatives are the more fundamental type of combiner, and applicatives (aka functions) are the sole special-form, constructed by calling `wrap` on another combiner.