replying to myself... re-reading the reference, transient symbols are also used for some scope stuff. i want to find out the specifics of this if its written anywhere, please point me to it. (btw, Alex, the documentation is great. i'm still on the learning curve).
"The interpreter recognizes external symbols internally by an additional tag bit in the tail structure. ". where is the tag bit implemented? in the C interpreter or picolisp? Ana On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 8:18 PM, Ana Zgombic <morse...@nybl.info> wrote: > Hi List, > > there are symbols in picolisp. > > there's the run of the mill symbol. yeah. can't live without them. > > then there are transient symbols. from the reference, they're used as > 'string literals' and can contain funky characters. > > 1) what's the lifecycle of the transient symbol in the picolisp interpreter? > 2) what other non obvious uses does the transient symbol fill? > 3) i was digging in the code and saw transient symbols being used as > function names. why so? > > there are also external symbols. used to represent database values. i > get that. and maybe more that i can't dig yet. > > 4) as far as i can tell, external symbols are just plain symbols > (transient, i think) with a special naming scheme. is this right? > 5) is there any special treatment in the interpreter for external > symbols? (because i can't find any so far). > > Ana > > PS again, excuse me for my questions. i want to understand the > language and implementation from the bottom up. picolisp is just too > delicious not to study. :) > > -- > http://nybl.info > -- http://nybl.info -- UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:picolisp@software-lab.de?subject=Unsubscribe
