use Perl

• not in HOP (Score:1)

  by brev (1827) on 2005.05.24 3:24 (#40683)

  I haven't even finished HOP yet, but I just digested a large Javascript tome [oreilly.com] for work reasons. JS has a few higher-ordery features that Perl doesn't.

  An interesting twist on eval, Function() creates a function reference out of an array of strings.

  And this JS 1.5 syntax, which gives an anonymous closure a temporary name so it can refer to itself.

  var f = function fact(x) { if (x <=1) return 1; else return x*fact(x-1); }

  Despite appearances, there is no fact(). That was just a name for use during the definition of f.

  I have tried to do this in Perl and failed. Someone told me one could do it with a Y combinator.

  Reply to This

  • Re:not in HOP (Score:2)

    by TorgoX (1933)

    One is tempted to do this:

    my $f = sub { ($_[0] <=1) ? 1 : ( $_[0] * $f->($_[0] - 1)) };
    print $f->(4);

    But that doesn't work, because sub is defined outside the scope of $f. So you've got to do this:

    my $f;
    $f = sub { ($_[0] <=1) ? 1 : ( $_[0] * $f->($_[0] - 1)) };
    print $f->(4);

    That works!

    (GC note: now $f and that sub constitute a circular data structure, so you need to do $f='whatever'; (or just undef($f)) to break the circularity.)
    • Re:not in HOP (Score:1)

      by brev (1827)

      Huh. Now I wonder why what I was trying didn't work. That seems relatively straightforward, with the slight inconvenience of defining the variable first. Callee was another weirdness I noticed too. Thanks.
  • And with arguments.callee (Score:2)

    by TorgoX (1933)

    Also:

    var f = function (x) { if (x <=1) return 1; else return x * arguments.callee(x-1); };