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From: new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: The search for heterogeneous lists is still on!
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Date: 2 Apr 91 22:34:32 GMT
References: <167:Mar3121:32:0891@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
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In article <167:Mar3121:32:0891@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>Does anyone have an example of a heterogeneous list---something beyond
>unions and callback functions---used in a real program?

What about Pascal's WRITELN function?  Please separate what the language
defines from the compiler's implementation of that functionality.

An analogy:

"Does anyone have an example of a recursive call -- something beyond
pushing arguments and return addresses on stacks -- used in a real program?"

Do you see the problem?  How can you possibly answer that?  How do you
answer when I say "Well, with a suitable preprocessor, you can put
recursion on top of a non-recursive language, so its all syntactic
sugar."

The syntactic sugar is what makes it work. *Everything* is syntactic
sugar for machine language. We are discussing what syntactic sugar is
good and bad and worthwhile and not.  To repeatedly say that it *is*
just syntactic sugar seems to miss the point and certainly fails to
communicate any valuable information.
	  -- Darren
-- 
--- Darren New --- Grad Student --- CIS --- Univ. of Delaware ---
----- Network Protocols, Graphics, Programming Languages, FDTs -----
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