Re: Reference and First-Class Function

> One of the main reasons for introducing HOF into
> the foundations is that it allows many other things to be layered on top,
> including such things as references, nested sequences, dictionaries, etc,
> with less effort and complexity than if they were defined as primitives.

The description so far that I have seen of implementing a reference with a =
HOF is the following:

=A0=A0=A0=A0 "A partial application or a closure will be used to implement =
a reference.

=A0=A0=A0=A0 The argument that is stored within the closure, and that must =
be=A0produced as result, is the reference."

This is a circular definition -- a reference is supposed to be implemented =
by something that relies on reference itself.=A0

So in this case the concept of reference is not layered on top of=A0the con=
cept of HOF.


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