Here’s a list of a few interesting systems. It is not exhaustive! Dynamically typed and compiled The Gambit Scheme compiler, Chez Scheme, Will Clinger’s Larceny Scheme compiler, the Bigloo Scheme compiler, and probably many others. Why? Lots of people really like Scheme. Programs as data, good macro system, 35 years of development, big community. But … Read more
I love compilers and VMs, and I love Lua. Lua is not as well supported as many other scripting languages, but from a mindset like yours I’m sure you will fall in love with Lua too. I mean it’s like lisp, (can do anything lisp can as far as I know), has lots of the … Read more
PHP (In no particular order) Inconsistent function names and argument orders Because there are a zillion functions, each one of which seems to use a different naming convention and argument order. “Lets see… is it foo_bar or foobar or fooBar… and is it needle, haystack or haystack, needle?” The PHP string functions are a perfect … Read more
See archived version with outlinks here. As of May 26, 2023, there is no standard modeling language for pure functional programming, but there are alternatives: 1. UML UML has traditionally been associated with object-oriented programming (OOP), mostly because of its historical roots1, 2, but one can certainly attempt to use it for different programming paradigms … Read more
Sure, the question is whether the macro is convenient to use and how powerful they are. Let’s first look how Lisp is slightly different. Lisp syntax is based on data, not text Lisp has a two-stage syntax. A) first there is the data syntax for s-expressions examples: (mary called tim to tell him the price … Read more
I don’t think there is black and white here – there is a whole spectrum between dynamic and static. Let’s take two extreme examples for each side of the spectrum, and see where that takes us. Haskell is an extreme in the static direction. It has a powerful type system that is checked at compile … Read more
I believe Lisp fits that description. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp
While a block is just a piece of code that can be composed by statements and declarations but nothing else, a closure is a real first-class object, a real variable that has a block as its value. The main difference is that a block simply groups instructions together (for example the body of a while … Read more
There’s a simple ad hoc proof for this. Since you can build a Turing complete language using strictly iterative structures and a Turing complete language using only recursive structures, then the two are therefore equivalent.
It doesn’t mean anything. It is rather a common naming convention for private member variables to keep them separated from methods and public properties. For example: class Foo { private int _counter; public int GetCounter() { return _counter; } public int SetCounter(int counter) { _counter = counter; } }