Re: Reference to "First-Class Data Type"

mab@wdl39.wdl.loral.com (Mark A Biggar)
Thu, 20 Feb 1992 16:35:16 GMT

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Related articles
Reference to "First-Class Data Type" reid@vtopus.cs.vt.edu (1992-02-18)
Re: Reference to "First-Class Data Type" moss@cs.umass.edu (1992-02-19)
Re: Reference to "First-Class Data Type" stachour@sctc.com (1992-02-20)
Re: Reference to "First-Class Data Type" jwb@cepmax.ncsu.edu (1992-02-20)
Re: Reference to "First-Class Data Type" mab@wdl39.wdl.loral.com (1992-02-20)
Re: Reference to "First-Class Data Type" eric@tfs.COM (1992-02-22)
Re: Reference to "First-Class Data Type" spot@CS.CMU.EDU (1992-02-24)
Re: Reference to "First-Class Data Type" pardo@cs.washington.edu (1992-02-24)
Re: Reference to "First-Class Data Type" glew@pdx007.intel.com (1992-02-25)
Re: Reference to "First-Class Data Type" scott@cs.rochester.edu (1992-02-25)
Re: Reference to "First-Class Data Type" rjbodkin@theory.lcs.mit.edu (Ronald Bodkin) (1992-02-25)
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Newsgroups: comp.compilers
From: mab@wdl39.wdl.loral.com (Mark A Biggar)
Keywords: types, Lisp
Organization: Loral Western Development Labs
References: 92-02-085
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1992 16:35:16 GMT

In article 92-02-085 reid@vtopus.cs.vt.edu (Thomas F. Reid) writes:
>The other day, I used the term "first-class data type" in conversation to
>mean a "complete" ADT. When challenged, I could not remember where I
>"learned" the term. Can someone give me the real definition and possibly
>a reference to its origin?


A "first-class data type" is one with no arbitrary restrictions on what
you can do with variables or values of the type. For example, in older
versions of C struct types were not first-class because they could'nt be
assigned, passed as arguments or returned from functions like int or
double. I believe the term came out of the LISP comunity were everything
is a first-class data type to explain some of the differences between LISP
and other languages.


--
Mark Biggar
mab@wdl1.wdl.loral.com
--

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