Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr...@ix.netcom.com> wrote: > As I recall from my programming language design class (only and > intro, it was so small we met in a meeting room rather than classroom), > ALGOL was described as "call by name";
It is true that Algol had 'call by name', but (at least the Algol-W that I learned) also supported 'call by value' and 'call by reference'. The danger of course was that call by name was the default mechanism so you could end up using it accidentally. I remember we had one class where we had to work out (by hand) the output of a program which used call by name to alias I and A[I] in some recursive calls. Not nice. Fortunately even at that time it was mostly being taught as an oddity; real programming was of course done in Algol 68C or BCPL. -- Duncan Booth http://kupuguy.blogspot.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
