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From: mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Call by string (was: B&D)
Message-ID: <51300013@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 27 Jan 89 14:39:00 GMT
References: <4261@enea.se>
Lines: 17
Nf-ID: #R:enea.se:4261:uxe.cso.uiuc.edu:51300013:000:831
Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald    Jan 27 08:39:00 1989


>Some while ago I asked the following:
>But to throw some new wood on the fire, consider the following: Assume
>you have routine you want to call but whose name you don't know until
>run-time, thus you have the name in a string. Now in which langauges
>can you easily do this? Interpreting langauges like Lisp and Basic,
>support this I guess. But compiled langauges?

I think that you are asking the wrong question, or maybe only a subset
of the full question. There are lots of languages (most?) where you
could find a way of getting to any routine known at original
compile-time. The real problem comes in getting at routines COMPILED
at run time. This often becomes an operating system question: it appears
that there are operating systems where it is impossible without
logging in from the operator's console. 

Doug McDonald