Re: Scratchpad confusion

At 4:51 PM -0500 10/20/02, Allen Short wrote:
>The ops described in PDD 6 and docs/parrot_assembly.pod for
>scratchpads appear to be subtly different from the ones actually in
>core.ops. In particular, i was led astray by the docs referring to the
>"newpad" op and core.ops implementing "new_pad". which is it supposed
>to be? =)

The name doesn't really matter, it's the functionality that's important.

>I started investigating scratchpads because I'm interested in
>improving the scheme compiler. I'd agree with Sean O'Rourke's comments
>(http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-internals@perl.org/msg12722.html)
>-- the current ops seem too limited; in particular, I dont see how one
>would save a scratchpad with a function definition, or modify the
>toplevel scratchpad.  Looking beyond Scheme, it appears to me that
>other languages would need more flexible handling of scoping as well;
>Common Lisp, for example, keeps functions in a separate namespace from
>other variables. Being new to Parrot hacking, could someone point me
>at the rationale for making scratchpads a special case, rather than a
>PMC?

There's no reason they can't be both a special case and a PMC. I'm 
not sure what we want to do for those languages that keep separate 
namespaces for various things, though I'm thinking we'll maintain a 
single global table with a prefix character that can be filtered out 
by languages that don't use it.
-- 
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk

• Scratchpad confusion by Allen Short
• Re: Scratchpad confusion by Dan Sugalski
• RE: Scratchpad confusion by Jonathan Sillito