> In this case the object labeled "rule" is still the same, but only because the effect of the rule has been altered within the agent, which for metaphorical purposes should be sufficient.
I'd say it comes down to whether or not predicate/action pairs can be defined on the fly. So long as there a way to make new functions that test for things and also can describe new states of the world (of which one part is more predicate/action pairs), then it should work fine for hybrid genetic programming / ABM. I'd put this under the general category of `rewriting systems'.
There is an important practical difference between, say, forking the GCC compiler every time a variant agent is proposed, versus having lightweight just-in-time native code compilation from first class programming language objects. You can crudely approximate the latter with more and more ad-hoc hacks (like you mention) in almost any kind of programming or modeling environment, but why not use tools well suited to the job? In the end an ad-hoc interpreter for will be clumsy and slow compared to the work of programming language implementors who spend years on design, tuning and optimization.
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