I'm glad we agree that one benefit of pure functions is loop-hoisting.
I call them pure functions because that's the technical name for them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_function - they're analogous to a
mathematical function. 'Read-only' sounds a little ambiguous to me and
not immediately certain as to what is actually read-only. Granted, the
meaning of 'pure' doesn't immediately jump out either, but the lack of
side-effects and consistent outputs for a given inputs are the necessary
criteria to be defined as such.
The "pure" directive, or the lack of it in most functions, helps takes
pressure off the compiler, while its presence aids the programmer by
explicitly stating that 'this function is pure' and can be used as
such. If a third-party library removes the purity of a function
compared to an earlier version, I would put the blame on the programmer
of the library rather than the language itself. There will always be
cases where you've screwed yourself over and have to change things, like
the addition of a new parameter in a subroutine.
I suppose node emulation would be equivalent to constant propagation. I
sense we might need to refactor things afterwards so the same code can
be reused for both purposes. My current design for the emulation would
introduce a new virtual method for TNode that descendants override to
perform their specific behaviour, rather than have it all in a
monolithic 'propagate' procedure. By default, this method would return
a 'fail' code to indicate the function is not pure (a function that is
marked as 'pure' but is discovered not to be will raise a compiler
warning, and an error if it's part of a constant assignment), so you
don't have to program something for every single node and the
introduction of a new node type won't break the emulator.
I think the difference between constant propagation and node emulation
in this regard is that the former is trying to simplify nodes and
eliminate conditional branches that will not be executed, among other
things, while the latter is trying to generate a single output (or
multiple if the routine has "out" parameters).
Gareth aka. Kit
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