Talk:First-class function: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 07:08, 13 November 2004

Revision as of 21:40, 3 April 2005

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Well, I was trying to pre-empty a potential argument that the presence of function pointers in C is the same as having first class functions. What are the crucial properties a function object has to have in order to qualify as first-class? You can pass function pointers as arguments to other functions, and you can store them in memory and other data structures; in these respects function pointers and first class functions are indeed similar. What distinguishes function pointers from first class functions is that the only values a function pointer can take on are the addressed of functions defined at compile/link time. However, due to the presence of casts (nothing stops you from casting arbitrary pointers to function pointers), this is not literally true, but those casts are really only useful for in-memory compilation. Since C directly supports function pointers and casts in the language, it makes sense to point out that these features don't add up to first class functions, with which they nevertheless share some properties. --[[User:MarkSweep|MarkSweep]] 07:08, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

: I agree with the garbage collector guy. When reading the page, you insintictively have the urge to say "hey but C...", yet the text corrects you in time. [[User:Wlievens|Wouter Lievens]] 21:40, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)