From: dblack@...
Date: 2003-02-17T06:54:17+09:00
Subject: Re: General programming language question

Hi --

On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Ryan Pavlik wrote:

> On Mon, 17 Feb 2003 02:35:05 +0900
> "Chris Pine" <nemo@hellotree.com> wrote:
> > What would be another way?  I don't know... I was thinking of
> > something like "variables as one-element hashes"... but of course you
> > need a variable to refer to the array, so we gained nothing.
>
> Well, Smalltalk uses a Dictionary, I believe, to map variables to their
> values, and there's no reason you can't make a language do similar.
> With Ruby, you can get a Binding and evaluate things inside it.  I'm
> rooting for the ability to do something like this:
>
>     varstr = "myvarname"
>     sym    = varstr.intern    # => :myvarname
>     sym.bind(42)
>
>     p myvarname               # => 42
>
> The only thing you can't currently do is the sym.bind() deal from Ruby.
> (Doing it on the C side is easy.)  So basically you've got your
> first-class variables.

Or even just:

  varstr = "myvarname"
  varstr.bind(42)

since the Symbol object is really just serving as a (probably faster)
string representation.


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav