On Tue, Mar 04, 2014 at 05:05:39PM -0800, Andrew Barnert wrote:
On Mar 4, 2014, at 14:31, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
Steven D'Aprano wrote:
What I have in my head is some vague concept that the Python evaluation rules will somehow know when to evaluate the thunk and when to treat it as an object, which is (as I understand it) what happens in Algol.
But Algol has the benefit of static typing -- the procedure being called explicitly declares whether the argument is to be passed by name or value. Python has no idea about that at compile time.
I'm not convinced that this really matters, but for the sake of the argument let's say it does.
This is the main reason I think it's more productive to think of this in terms of Lisp-style quoting than Algol-style thunks.
Can you give more detail please? -- Steven