What other languages use the same data model as Python?

Duncan Booth duncan.booth at invalid.invalid
Mon May 2 04:43:47 EDT 2011


Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> As I recall from my programming language design class (only and
> intro, it was so small we met in a meeting room rather than classroom),
> ALGOL was described as "call by name";

It is true that Algol had 'call by name', but (at least the Algol-W that I 
learned) also supported 'call by value' and 'call by reference'. The danger 
of course was that call by name was the default mechanism so you could end 
up using it accidentally.

I remember we had one class where we had to work out (by hand) the output 
of a program which used call by name to alias I and A[I] in some recursive 
calls. Not nice. Fortunately even at that time it was mostly being taught 
as an oddity; real programming was of course done in Algol 68C or BCPL.

-- 
Duncan Booth http://kupuguy.blogspot.com



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