On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 7:52 PM, daly <d...@axiom-developer.org> wrote:
<snip> > > A justification of homoiconicisty is that programs == data. > > A clever soul named Von Neumann made the observation that machines > were controlled by external commands (i.e. programs) to operate on > things (i.e. data). His insight was to unify the problem and treat > programs as data resulting in the invention of the stored program > computer. > > If you completely separate something like a loader (program) from > its data (the binary program) then there is no way to treat the > program-you-load as the-program-to-run. > > Today we teach students to write "programs to manipulate data" so we > have returned to the pre- Von Neumann mindset. It is considered the > height of bad form to execute data. In fact, some bright spot > added SELinux with the default policy that you could not > execute code from the heap! You are spot on with this. We have built a whole army of programmers who would manipulate data instead of transforming data. Sooner or later this practice results in bloated code. regards Vivek -- The hidden harmony is better than the obvious!! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
