At 4:51 PM -0500 10/20/02, Allen Short wrote:
The ops described in PDD 6 and docs/parrot_assembly.pod for scratchpads appear to be subtly different from the ones actually in core.ops. In particular, i was led astray by the docs referring to the "newpad" op and core.ops implementing "new_pad". which is it supposed to be? =)
The name doesn't really matter, it's the functionality that's important.
There's no reason they can't be both a special case and a PMC. I'm not sure what we want to do for those languages that keep separate namespaces for various things, though I'm thinking we'll maintain a single global table with a prefix character that can be filtered out by languages that don't use it.I started investigating scratchpads because I'm interested in improving the scheme compiler. I'd agree with Sean O'Rourke's comments (http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-internals@;perl.org/msg12722.html) -- the current ops seem too limited; in particular, I dont see how one would save a scratchpad with a function definition, or modify the toplevel scratchpad. Looking beyond Scheme, it appears to me that other languages would need more flexible handling of scoping as well; Common Lisp, for example, keeps functions in a separate namespace from other variables. Being new to Parrot hacking, could someone point me at the rationale for making scratchpads a special case, rather than a PMC?
--
Dan
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