Michele Dondi writes: > On Tue, 29 Jun 2004, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote: > > > > Difficulties: define "history" of a function w.r.t. threads; closures; > > and system side-effects (writing to files, locking them etc.) > > > On Tue, 29 Jun 2004, Mark A. Biggar wrote: > > > Besides we already have MTOWTDI with local() and hypotheticals. > > (i) I think it's temp() in Perl6, (ii) I don't know what hypotheticals > are.
Hypotheticals are those C<let> things from Apocalypse 5. They are best illustrated by example: my $x = 5; try { let $x = 10; die; # unsuccessful exit from block } # $x is 5 again try { let $x = 10; } # successful exit from block # $x is now 10 They're a way of making a hypothesis, and then if that hypothesis leads to failure, "undoing" the hypothesis since it was false. It's really neat stuff. See Whatif.pm for a Truly Evil Perl 5 implementation of this kind of thing. Don't look at the source: you might vomit. Luke > Anyway, guys, I'll take your word for it... > > > Michele > -- > You know, you would learn a lot more mathematics from a mathematics > book than from a Mathematica book. > - Dave Rusin in sci.math, "Re: A Klein Bottle has no inside or outside."