Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!ukc!strath-cs!nott-cs!piaggio!anw
From: anw@maths.nott.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Mea culpa (was: Re: Re: Algol68 (and standards diatribe))
Message-ID: <1991May13.165257.9727@maths.nott.ac.uk>
Date: 13 May 91 16:52:57 GMT
References: <1991May10.162820.2662@maths.nott.ac.uk>
Reply-To: anw@maths.nott.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker)
Organization: Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.
Lines: 19

In article <1991May10.162820.2662@maths.nott.ac.uk> I wrote

    [re a delivered procedure in Algol using a scoped variable "x"]

>	You could always declare "HEAP REAL x" to give "x" global scope,
>and then your procedure would work anywhere,

	I shouldn't post on Friday afternoons!  I started to have nagging
doubts as I drove home, wondering how to do garbage collection efficiently.
My copy of the Report is on loan elsewhere, but assuming that Lindsey and
van der Meulen are right [and they usually are], the procedure is indeed
scoped by the range of "x", not the scope of "x".  Thus, the above is not
true, and Steve Knight had a point.  This is still not unorthogonal (*all*
procedures are scoped this way, there is nothing special about procedures
being returned as results), but it is certainly unobvious.

-- 
Andy Walker, Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.
anw@maths.nott.ac.uk