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Lambda Lifting
Lambda lifting is a meta-process that restructures a computer program so that functions are defined independently of each other in a global scope. An individual "lift" transforms a local function into a global function. It is a two step process, consisting of; * Eliminating free variables in the function by adding parameters. * Moving functions from a restricted scope to broader or global scope. The term "lambda lifting" was first introduced by Thomas Johnsson around 1982 and was historically considered as a mechanism for implementing functional programming languages. It is used in conjunction with other techniques in some modern compilers. Lambda lifting is not the same as closure conversion. It requires all call sites to be adjusted (adding extra arguments to calls) and does not introduce a closure for the lifted lambda expression. In contrast, closure conversion does not require call sites to be adjusted but does introduce a closure for the lambda expression mapping free va ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metaprogramming
Metaprogramming is a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as their data. It means that a program can be designed to read, generate, analyze or transform other programs, and even modify itself while running. In some cases, this allows programmers to minimize the number of lines of code to express a solution, in turn reducing development time. It also allows programs a greater flexibility to efficiently handle new situations without recompilation. Metaprogramming can be used to move computations from run-time to compile-time, to generate code using compile time computations, and to enable self-modifying code. The ability of a programming language to be its own metalanguage is called reflection. Reflection is a valuable language feature to facilitate metaprogramming. Metaprogramming was popular in the 1970s and 1980s using list processing languages such as LISP. LISP hardware machines were popular in the 1980s and enabled app ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
First-class Object
In programming language design, a first-class citizen (also type, object, entity, or value) in a given programming language is an entity which supports all the operations generally available to other entities. These operations typically include being passed as an argument, returned from a function, and assigned to a variable. History The concept of first- and second-class objects was introduced by Christopher Strachey in the 1960s. He did not actually define the term strictly, but contrasted real numbers and procedures in ALGOL: First and second class objects. In ALGOL, a real number may appear in an expression or be assigned to a variable, and either of them may appear as an actual parameter in a procedure call. A procedure, on the other hand, may only appear in another procedure call either as the operator (the most common case) or as one of the actual parameters. There are no other expressions involving procedures or whose results are procedures. Thus in a sense procedures in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Closure (computer Science)
In programming languages, a closure, also lexical closure or function closure, is a technique for implementing lexically scoped name binding in a language with first-class functions. Operationally, a closure is a record storing a function together with an environment. The environment is a mapping associating each free variable of the function (variables that are used locally, but defined in an enclosing scope) with the value or reference to which the name was bound when the closure was created. Unlike a plain function, a closure allows the function to access those ''captured variables'' through the closure's copies of their values or references, even when the function is invoked outside their scope. History and etymology The concept of closures was developed in the 1960s for the mechanical evaluation of expressions in the λ-calculus and was first fully implemented in 1970 as a language feature in the PAL programming language to support lexically scoped first-class functions. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Garbage Collection (computer Science)
In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The ''garbage collector'' attempts to reclaim memory which was allocated by the program, but is no longer referenced; such memory is called '' garbage''. Garbage collection was invented by American computer scientist John McCarthy around 1959 to simplify manual memory management in Lisp. Garbage collection relieves the programmer from doing manual memory management, where the programmer specifies what objects to de-allocate and return to the memory system and when to do so. Other, similar techniques include stack allocation, region inference, and memory ownership, and combinations thereof. Garbage collection may take a significant proportion of a program's total processing time, and affect performance as a result. Resources other than memory, such as network sockets, database handles, windows, file descriptors, and device descriptors, are not typically handled by garbage collection, but ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Function Pointer
A function pointer, also called a subroutine pointer or procedure pointer, is a pointer that points to a function. As opposed to referencing a data value, a function pointer points to executable code within memory. Dereferencing the function pointer yields the referenced function, which can be invoked and passed arguments just as in a normal function call. Such an invocation is also known as an "indirect" call, because the function is being invoked ''indirectly'' through a variable instead of ''directly'' through a fixed identifier or address. Function pointers can be used to simplify code by providing a simple way to select a function to execute based on run-time values. Function pointers are supported by third-generation programming languages (such as PL/I, COBOL, Fortran, dBASE dBL, and C) and object-oriented programming languages (such as C++, C#, and D). Simple function pointers The simplest implementation of a function (or subroutine) pointer is as a variable containi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stack Frame
In computer science, a call stack is a stack data structure that stores information about the active subroutines of a computer program. This kind of stack is also known as an execution stack, program stack, control stack, run-time stack, or machine stack, and is often shortened to just "the stack". Although maintenance of the call stack is important for the proper functioning of most software, the details are normally hidden and automatic in high-level programming languages. Many computer instruction sets provide special instructions for manipulating stacks. A call stack is used for several related purposes, but the main reason for having one is to keep track of the point to which each active subroutine should return control when it finishes executing. An active subroutine is one that has been called, but is yet to complete execution, after which control should be handed back to the point of call. Such activations of subroutines may be nested to any level (recursive as a special ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lazy Evaluation
In programming language theory, lazy evaluation, or call-by-need, is an evaluation strategy which delays the evaluation of an expression until its value is needed (non-strict evaluation) and which also avoids repeated evaluations (sharing). The benefits of lazy evaluation include: * The ability to define control flow (structures) as abstractions instead of primitives. * The ability to define potentially infinite data structures. This allows for more straightforward implementation of some algorithms. * The ability to define partially-defined data structures where some elements are errors. This allows for rapid prototyping. Lazy evaluation is often combined with memoization, as described in Jon Bentley's ''Writing Efficient Programs''. After a function's value is computed for that parameter or set of parameters, the result is stored in a lookup table that is indexed by the values of those parameters; the next time the function is called, the table is consulted to determine whe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Haskell (programming Language)
Haskell () is a general-purpose, statically-typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research and industrial applications, Haskell has pioneered a number of programming language features such as type classes, which enable type-safe operator overloading, and monadic IO. Haskell's main implementation is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). It is named after logician Haskell Curry. Haskell's semantics are historically based on those of the Miranda programming language, which served to focus the efforts of the initial Haskell working group. The last formal specification of the language was made in July 2010, while the development of GHC continues to expand Haskell via language extensions. Haskell is used in academia and industry. , Haskell was the 28th most popular programming language by Google searches for tutorials, and made up less than 1% of active users on the GitHub source code repository. History ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
LIFO (computing)
In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with two main operations: * Push, which adds an element to the collection, and * Pop, which removes the most recently added element that was not yet removed. Additionally, a peek operation can, without modifying the stack, return the value of the last element added. Calling this structure a ''stack'' is by analogy to a set of physical items stacked one atop another, such as a stack of plates. The order in which an element added to or removed from a stack is described as last in, first out, referred to by the acronym LIFO. As with a stack of physical objects, this structure makes it easy to take an item off the top of the stack, but accessing a datum deeper in the stack may require taking off multiple other items first. Considered as a linear data structure, or more abstractly a sequential collection, the push and pop operations occur only at one end of the structure, referred to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eager Evaluation
In a programming language, an evaluation strategy is a set of rules for evaluating expressions. The term is often used to refer to the more specific notion of a ''parameter-passing strategy'' that defines the kind of value that is passed to the function for each parameter (the ''binding strategy'') and whether to evaluate the parameters of a function call, and if so in what order (the ''evaluation order''). The notion of reduction strategy is distinct, although some authors conflate the two terms and the definition of each term is not widely agreed upon. To illustrate, executing a function call f(a,b) may first evaluate the arguments a and b, store the results in references or memory locations ref_a and ref_b, then evaluate the function's body with those references passed in. This gives the function the ability to look up the argument values, to modify them via assignment as if they were local variables, and to return values via the references. This is the call-by-reference evalu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Call Stack
In computer science, a call stack is a stack data structure that stores information about the active subroutines of a computer program. This kind of stack is also known as an execution stack, program stack, control stack, run-time stack, or machine stack, and is often shortened to just "the stack". Although maintenance of the call stack is important for the proper functioning of most software, the details are normally hidden and automatic in high-level programming languages. Many computer instruction sets provide special instructions for manipulating stacks. A call stack is used for several related purposes, but the main reason for having one is to keep track of the point to which each active subroutine should return control when it finishes executing. An active subroutine is one that has been called, but is yet to complete execution, after which control should be handed back to the point of call. Such activations of subroutines may be nested to any level (recursive as a speci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Block (programming)
In computer programming, a block or code block or block of code is a lexical structure of source code which is grouped together. Blocks consist of one or more Declaration (computer programming), declarations and Statement (computer science), statements. A programming language that permits the creation of blocks, including blocks Nesting (computing), nested within other blocks, is called a block-structured programming language. Blocks are fundamental to structured programming, where control structures are formed from blocks. Blocks have two functions: to group statements so that they can be treated as one statement, and to define scope (computer science), scopes for name binding, names to distinguish them from the same name used elsewhere. In a block-structured programming language, the objects named in outer blocks are visible inside inner blocks, unless they are Name masking, masked by an Object (computer science), object declared with the same name. History Ideas of block st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
