[Gridflow-dev] ping (fwd)

[Tom Schouten]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 11:25:08PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 16 Sep 2004, Tom Schouten wrote:
> 
> > > Closure style is not OO. It's afaik a step between classic structured
> > > programming and OO.
> > what's the core of the difference then? do frozen contexts in closures
> > have to be immutable? (evaluation vs mutation?)
> 
> Mutability has nothing to do with it all.
>

i wouldn't be too sure about that.
i'm not big with definitions and all, but i think the concept of
closure is only well-defined in a functional programming environment.

and as far as i understand the origin of lisp, lisp (stripped of
all mutators) is actually meant to be a replacement for the concept 
of 'turing machine'.

turing machine is a state machine, and talks about mutation as
it's basic action.

lisp is an evaluator, and talks about evaluation as its basic
action.

these 2 views are fundamentally different, which is i think
the base of the difference between the two. the rest is just
extensions to the ideas of state+mutation vs evaluation.