Re: The Red Language

["Dean F. Sutherland" <dfsuther@ux4.sp.cs.cmu.edu>]

I guess that Robert is correct for the general case of specifying inline
expansion.  There's one specific case where I believe that the Gnal
"spec" does indeed reasonbly "mandate" inline expansion (possibly even
to Robert's satisfaction).

Routines with nam binding for their formals would seem to "require"
actual inline expansion.  (You'll recall from earlier in this thread
that nam binding specifies re-evaluation of the actual object expression
from the call site at each reference in the body of the routine.) 
Treating this as (fully semantically checked) macro expansion is the
obvious and straightforward way to achieve this effect.

On the other hand, I suppose that one _could_ do something with
carefully produced function closures or some other such hack (I mean
workaround) -- but I'm hard pressed to see why it would be worth the
effort.

A formalist might argue that, given the lack of a formal language
definition, the inline expansion "mandate" is no more than strongly
worded implementation advice.  Of course, this would also imply that
many common procurement specifications for compilation systems are also
no more than strongly worded implementation advice...

Dean