Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!lfcs!db
From: db@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Dave Berry)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Call by string (was: B&D)
Message-ID: <1283@etive.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 24 Jan 89 14:47:44 GMT
References: <4261@enea.se>
Sender: news@etive.ed.ac.uk
Reply-To: db@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Dave Berry)
Organization: Laboratory for the Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh U
Lines: 19

In article <4261@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>  But Peter's function tables? Could one not require that every
>function loads a table entry at startup with itself? The global access
>cannot be a problem. Unfortunately, there is a little obstacle.
>To do the loading the module has to be activated. But by whom? The
>menu handler does at this stage not know about it. So you have to
>have some other code that knows about all functions in the system,
>and this is exactly what we want to avoid.

I'm not sure I understand this example.  Couldn't one use a generic menu
handler that takes a list of names and a symbol table as a parameter?
I don't see why you need to avoid a piece of code that knows about
all the functions in scope in your system, provided that that code doesn't
constrain the men handler to dealing with a specific system.


Dave Berry,	Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh.
		db%lfcs.ed.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk
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