3 ms·

Guy Lewis Steele, Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman. "The Art of the Interpreter of, the Modularity Complex (Parts Zero, One, and Two)". MIT AI Lab. AI Lab Memo AIM-45

• taeric 13y ago
  Holy crap, just from the abstract I can't help but think many today would balk at the claim "More general side effects are also found to be necessary to promote modular style." Thank you very much for this link! I should have known to search for work by these authors. I can only dream of a world where I could have found their works more prominent in something like infoq.
• agentultra 13y ago
  Thanks for the link to that paper! I recommend reading the section on "Top Level vs Referential Transparency" after reading this article. It argues that the trade-offs for absolute transparency require the programmer to define the entire world ahead of time. This trade-off is not acceptable by the authors of the paper for reasons elucidated in earlier sections and in SICP and so they demonstrate a version of EVAL whose environment allows for forward-references to top-level forms which we know is useful to writing dynamically compiled programs and decoupled modules. Every pure-FP language implementation has to make trade-offs with impure, mutable state and data. Haskell had to add the IO monad. Clojure has Var and Ref. Engineering isn't a discipline of absolutes. http://this-plt-life.tumblr.com/post/44462204757/simon-peyton-jones-adding-the-io-monad-to-haskell http://this-plt-life.tumblr.com/post/44462204757/simon-peyto...