Re: First-class environments

On Apr 5, 2006, at 1:46 PM, Pascal Costanza wrote:

>> What I'd like to know are: 1) What are the best/most important/ 
>> most famous papers on this subject?
>
> Here are some papers that I am aware of:
>
> - Franz Achermann, Oscar Nierstrasz, Explicit Namespaces

The Piccola language by Achermann, et al, allows extending the  
namespace with an arbitrary expression. I remember reading a paper on  
Piccola which describes using partial evaluation to eliminate the  
environments, but I am not sure to what extent that they are able to  
regain performance. I didn't fully follow the implications of the  
algorithm on a casual reading of it. The reference implementation in  
Java uses a branched list implementation of the environments which  
makes name lookup O(N) -- pretty bad.

--- james mccartney