[gambit-list] Reading binary files

Bob McIsaac bobmc at fcibroadband.com
Thu Dec 20 22:26:15 EST 2007


Alex Sandro Queiroz e Silva wrote:
> Hallo,
>
> Bob McIsaac escreveu:
>> 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)
>>   
>
>     You are confused here. You may believe that evaluating arguments
> to functions "in one pass" is the most efficient way, but it may not
> be. Scheme compilers are free to change the order of evaluation of the
> arguments to functions at will, so they can find better arrangements.
> Not all compilers do that, though.
>
> Cheers,
> -alex
>
>
>
>
Hi:   I am not too worried about efficiency but I must read some more
the meaning of evaluation. I thought it was a method of converting
expressions into executable code.  Perhaps it is more subtle than I
realized.

Cheers,  -Bob-





More information about the Gambit-list mailing list