[gambit-list] Reading binary files

Bob McIsaac bobmc at fcibroadband.com
Wed Dec 19 23:15:12 EST 2007


Christian Jaeger wrote:
> Bob McIsaac wrote:
>> Instead, there are only linked lists to follow.
>
> But what about the order in which those linked lists are being
> followed..? That's not specified in the language and implementation
> dependent.
>
> (PS. of course nobody says that an implementation can't turn the
> linked lists into some other representation (like assembler). Not
> specifying the order of execution of function arguments was meant as
> to leave implementors more freedom to choose the best evaluation
> strategy.)
>
>
>
>
The puzzling comment to my humble form said : "This code assumes that
arguments to functions are evaluated left-to-right."  But what of it? 
There is a stream of text to be evaluated.  Choices are 1. left-right
evaluation in one pass; 2. parsing the stream into tokens and sorting
the tokens into a tree according to the rules of the grammar ... not
Lispy.  Choice 1 means typing parentheses so that the evaluator can be
simple and recursive.  ( I assume that evaluation results in a linked list)

Cheers, -Bob






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