Re: First-class environments

Michael Vanier <[email protected]> writes:

> What I'd like to know are: 1) What are the best/most important/most famous
> papers on this subject?  2) What are peoples' opinions on this?  I'd
> especially like to hear about elegant coding idioms using first-class
> environments and also horror stories (if any).  For instance, are there
> certain important language features or optimizations that first-class
> environments make impossible?

You could also look at Wouter van Oortmerssen's Bla language.

>From the webpage:

http://strlen.com/bla/ 

Extending Functional Programming with First Class Environments

abstract: We investigate an (unpure) functional language whose concept of
environment is not implicit as in traditional languages, but made available
explicitly as a first class value. This results in a semantics for environments
that is best known from the object oriented paradigm, and gives us a united
function/class concept in a very orthogonal way. We also look at the language
as a real-world general purpose language, considering semantics (of
type-inference, for example), implementation issues, and practical experience
in using the compiler.



Wouter van Oortmerssen has many nifty language ideas on his page.  
I do wish the implementations were available, I learn by doing.
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