Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 17:19:41 -0600 (CST) From: David Scheidt <dscheidt@enteract.com> To: Roelof Osinga <roelof@nisser.com> Cc: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, Tani Hosokawa <unknown@riverstyx.net>, Jonathon McKitrick <jcm@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>, Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>, Kris Kennaway <kris@hub.freebsd.org>, freebsd-chat <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Yahoo hacked last night Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96.991209171109.58439A-100000@shell-2.enteract.com> In-Reply-To: <38502053.28737F7B@nisser.com>
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On Thu, 9 Dec 1999, Roelof Osinga wrote: > David Scheidt wrote: > > > > I learned it in the context of functional languages which do > > lazy-evaluation. A function call didn't need to return the actual result of > > the function, but rather just a promise that the result would be evaluated > > in the future, but only if the result were really needed for something. For > > all intents, the thunk returned could be used in any way that the actual > > result could. So it is easy to right an O(1) function to find the Nth digit > > of Pi. Printing your result, though, could take a really long time. > > Why the past tense? I "recently" implemented one. Unfortunately I wrote > it in Smalltalk on OS/2 (Digitalk's V/PM) so it has been sort of > neglected since I moved away from that platform. Er, because I no longer use any functional languages. I don't doubt that functional languages will be around for a while. They are nice to program in, once you get your mind around them. The level of abstraction they provide lets one do very powerful things easily. I once had to translate a short scheme program, maybe 150 or 200 lines, into C. It took the better part of a thousand lines, and a lot of head scratching to get right. The scheme program was developed, and debugged , inside the course of an afternoon. > But their type correctness makes up for a lot. Will prevent a lot > of errors and thus save a lot of time. With the continued increase > in clock speed and RAM they could have a very good future ahead of > them. Whatever became of symbolics and their Lisp Machines? I have never seen one, but they sound neat. David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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