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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Complexity of syntax
Message-ID: <4055@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 31 Jan 91 19:02:19 GMT
References: <361@coatimundi.cs.arizona.edu> <28228:Jan902:38:1891@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 13

In article <28228:Jan902:38:1891@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>I'm still pretty sure that ``first-class'' means what we think it does.
>Unfortunately, it appears that the Scheme literature has gone out of its
>way to abuse the term, so we can't use the standard definition of
>``first-class'' without causing a ruckus. It's always a shame when
>useful terms are killed in this way.

Actually, it seems that some C fans are going out of their way
to abuse the term, because for some reason they can't stand the
idea that functions might not be first class in C.

Look at some non-Scheme literature such as Stoy's book on
denotational semantics, for example.