Programming Languages: Concepts and Implementation

11.5 Chapter Summary

In this chapter, we implemented non-recursive and recursive, user-defined functions in Camille. In Camille, functions are represented as closures. We built three representations for the closure data type: an abstract-syntax representation (ASR), a closure representation (CLS), and a Python closure representation (i.e., lambda expressions in Python; Programming Exercise 11.2.12). When a function is invoked, we pass the values to be bound to the arguments of the function to the closure representing the function. For the ASR and CLS representations of a closure, a pointer to the environment in which the function is defined is stored in the closure (i.e., lexical scoping). For the Python closure representation (i.e., lambda ...