Subject: Re: lambda mysticism?
From: rpw3@rigden.engr.sgi.com (Rob Warnock)
Date: 6 Sep 2001 03:00:10 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Message-ID: <9n6orq$gvg49$1@fido.engr.sgi.com>
Brian Harvey <bh@abbenay.cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
+---------------
| If one were going to pick a second feature to put next to first-class
| procedures, the one chosen by the RnRS authors is lexical scope:
| 	Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive
| 	dialect of the Lisp programming language...  [p. 1]
+---------------

And the third -- also from the RnRS authors, as you note -- is proper
tail-call optimization ("safe-for-space"). This permits an *extremely*
natural representation of a large class of "state machine" problems,
not to mention obtaining guaranteed iterative behavior from lexically
recursive texts.


-Rob

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Rob Warnock, 30-3-510		<rpw3@sgi.com>
SGI Network Engineering		<http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/>
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