Re: lambda-like expressions for C

[Evan Lavelle <eml riverside-machines com>]

Paul Davis wrote:

> your original email included something like this:
>
>    lambda ("some C expression")
>
> i interpreted the quotes as significant. sorry if that led me to
> under-estimate your understanding of what you were asking.

Ah - that explains a lot; this is a quote from the OP, not me. I replied 
because his problem sounds interesting and I think it's valid, and it's 
similar to problems that I also have.

> lambda ("some C expression")

As it happens, I did consider putting the relevant expressions in quotes 
for my own code, and then parsing the string during my 'deferred 
evaluation' at runtime. This is convenient and the parsing is easy (at 
least if only limited expressions are allowed), but I don't currently 
think that this is a good idea. The main problems are that there's 
obviously no static compiler checking of the contents of the string, 
leading to run-time rather than compile-time failures (very bad in my 
application), and, secondly, that you can't easily cross-reference the 
string "wibble" to the object 'wibble'. However, the quoting appraoch 
does have significant benefits - for example, you can have expressions 
which include only built-in types, which you can't do if you're relying 
on overloading.

> i prefer SigC++, which does the same thing and is very slightly more
> powerful. it might do that kind of thing you mean, in that you can
> wrap up a function call plus any number of arguments (of any type),
> and it will generate a closure for you that can be "executed" later:

this sounds very interesting; I'll look it up. Thanks.

Evan