Language Design

["David McClain" <dmcclain@azstarnet.com>]

John Max Skaller said:
> I am designing a programming language (the compiler is written
in ocaml) which is a procedural language with 'purely functional'
expressions (using eager evaluation). Function closures can
access their context, which procedural statements my change between
building the closure and evaulating it. Procedural closures may
mutate their environment.

DM says:

I, for one, have fought for many years with languages that insisted on a
division between functions and procedures as you describe them. I have found
the unified "everything is a function" approach to be most appealing. In
particular, the worst offenders are those languages that insist on syntactic
distinctions such as Fortran, RSI/IDL, and Basic. I cannot be alone in
having difficulty remembering when a routine, whose result I don't really
need, is to be called as a function, or as a procedure.

I hope you find an answer to your question, but I do not look forward to
another such language.

Sincerely

David McClain, Sr. Scientist, Raytheon Systems Co., Tucson, AZ