On 2018-02-08, at 08:33:37, Bernd Oppolzer wrote: > Am 08.02.2018 um 15:50 schrieb Martin Ward: >> >> >> http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Man_or_boy_test >> > I would like to thank you very much for posting this. > I never heard about this test before, but I am very fascinated by it, > and I will try it out in the next days on my New Stanford Pascal compiler, > as soon as I have time to do it (there is a Pascal version of the test > on the page you mentioned above). > I glanced very briefly at it. It depends on nested procedure declarations which C lacks (and call-by-name? which Pascal lacks). PL/I?
I think nested procedures were an early manifestation of OO-think: a block is an object and procedures within it are methods. Languages such as C eschew nested procedures partly because a procedure descriptor must consist of two pointers rather than just one. I vaguely remember one compiler (but I think it was C) that did this with an extra indirection: a procedure reference actually pointed to a structure containing two pointers, one for the entry point and the other for the stack frame. Broke a lot of things, especially expectation of portability. -- gil
