I'm moving to stick this on social.

Quote from the news article I finally accessed: -- Suppose someone else used a language called Kwook and was trying to understand the benefit of first-class integers in C. He might point out that in Kwook, you can declare an integer like this:

int four_hundred_eight = 408;

Then whenever you need 408 to be the argument to a function, you just pass a pointer to the four_hundred_eight integer. If a function (say, addition), needs to return 408, just return the same pointer.

How would you explain to the Kwook programmer that first-class integers are better? --

OK, I can see why it's a pain having to reference and dereference by hand. Does first-class mean that references are constructed autom., or that the thing can be copied? I see no point in copying a thing unless it can be altered. And if the point is to be able to create a copy of a function which can be altered, what's wrong with (let ((a "display") (b "hello")) (eval list(a " " b)) )

(or equivalent written in non-babytalk Scheme).

MJ Ray wrote:

What is a Cache object? Yes, that's a philosophical question ;-)

An object which holds references to other objects (held locally) to allow faster retrieval thereof. I'd guess you could do something funky to try and ensure that all those objects were held in RAM at all times. I think I see why you think it's a philosophical question, but the idea of recursive caches isn't all that interesting, so perhaps I missed it.

Yep, Guile is Scheme. And how many current browsers include JREs? Isn't that a dying trend? Java is surely a language which has had its day in the sun... now to see how it weathers a winter.

True, Java isn't being shipped with IE6, it's an installable component. But I believe Mozilla still has it. And Java is apparently achieving massive growth in the embedded/handheld device markets. It has the massive advantage of being structural (or procedural or whatever I'm meant to call it... Cish), which is how most people learn to think when they're taught to program.

Incidentally, if you do this: (begin (define function1 (lambda (x) (...))) (define function2 (lambda (x y) (...))) (function1 2.5) (display (function2 3.8 "Hello")) ) doesn't that look rather structural? I'm really struggling to get a grip on this functional stuff.

Huh? My personal site is entertainingly broken at the moment (try it in moz), but I don't recall there being any non-relative internal URLs on it, as that's a pet hate of mine.

http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ from your sig. Left nav bar. Moz 0.9.2.

Alexis