blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson) (02/29/88)
In article <1893@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> rjchen@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Raymond Juimong Chen) writes: >Propose that there be a way to declare "true functions", ie, functions >whose return values depend on and are solely determined by the arguments >passed to it. They also have no side-effects. SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelegence Language) has this. It allows much more powerful constant expressions besides the better code generated. > 3. be calculated at any time provided the arguments are known. The "any time" of course should included the compile/link process. Unfortunatly, most current compiler/linkers can't handle conversions of function calls to constants and subsequent optimization... (SAIL has one major problem: it is closely tied to an obsolete 36 bit arcitecture. It has a lot of features I would like to see made more common including true strings, case expressions, concurency, etc.) -- Bob Larson Arpa: Blarson@Ecla.Usc.Edu blarson@skat.usc.edu Uucp: {sdcrdcf,cit-vax}!oberon!skat!blarson Prime mailing list: info-prime-request%fns1@ecla.usc.edu oberon!fns1!info-prime-request