Calling Conventions and Pass By Reference

[Yuval Kogman]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2008 at 20:13:12 +0100, Simon Wistow wrote:

> For the first example, the answer is pretty clearly 14 but for the 
> second the answer could arguably be either 14 *or* 24.
...
> More importantly - if that happened would it even matter? Would old 
> programmers have a problem with it but new programmers just adapt?

Functional Reactive Programming is the paradigm in which this *is*
true.

Every value is conceptually an infinite stream of values, so e.g.
writing a clock widget amounts to assigning the output of some
formatting function applied to $time, into a GUI widget. The system
will reevaluate on any change.

Of course smart FRP systems use static analysis to figure out in
which cases this can be optimized, and then you wind up with
something that works kind of like traditional GUI bindings under the
hood, but with none of the programming effort.

Unfortunately not many implementations exist, as this is extremely
hard to plug into an existing system. I think DrScheme's is the only
real implementation I know.

-- 
  Yuval Kogman <nothingmuch at woobling.org>
http://nothingmuch.woobling.org  0xEBD27418