In R programing for those coming from other languages John Cook says that
R uses lexical scoping while S-PLUS uses static scope. The difference can be subtle, particularly when using closures.
I found this odd because I have always thought lexical scoping and static scoping where synonymous.
Are there distinct attributes to lexical and static scoping, or is this a distinction that changes from community to community, person to person? If so, what are the general camps and how do I tell them apart so I can better understand someones meaning when they use these words.
Wikipedia (and I) agree with you that the terms "lexical scope" and "static scope" are synonymous. This Lua discussion tries to make a distinction, but notes that people don't agree as to what that distinction is. :-)
It appears to me that the attempted distinction has to do with accessing names in a different function-activation-record ("stack block", if you will) than the most-current-execution record, which mainly (only?) occurs in nested functions:
function f:
var x
function h:
var y
use(y) -- obviously, accesses y in current activation of h
use(x) -- the question is, which x does this access?
With lexical scope, the answer is "the activation of f that called the activation of h" and with dynamic scope it means "the most recent activation that has any variable named x" (which might not be f). On the other hand, if the language forbids the use of x at all, there's no question about "which x is this" since the answer is "error". :-) It looks as though some people use "static scope" to refer to this third case.
R official documentation also addresses differences of scope between R and S-plus:
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.html#Scope
The example given from the link can be simplified like this:
cube <- function(n) {
sq <- function() n*n
n*sq()
}
The results from S-Plus and R are different:
## first evaluation in S
S> cube(2)
Error in sq(): Object "n" not found
Dumped
S> n <- 3
S> cube(2)
[1] 18
## then the same function evaluated in R
R> cube(2)
[1] 8
I personally think the way of treating variable in R is more natural.
Related
(This question is a follow-up of this one while studying Haskell.)
I used to find the notion between "variable" and "value" confusing. Therefore I read about the wiki-page of lambda calculus as well as the previous answer above. I come out with below interpretations.
May I confirm whether these are correct? Just want to double confirm because these concept are quite basic but essential to functional programming. Any advice is welcome.
Premises from wiki:
Lambda Calculus syntax
exp → ID
| (exp)
| λ ID.exp // abstraction
| exp exp // application
(Notation: "<=>" equivalent to)
Interpretations:
"value": it is the actual data or instructions stored in computer.
"variable": it is a way locating the data, a value-replacing reference , but not itself the set of data or instruction stored in computer.
"abstraction" <=> "function" ∈ syntactic form. (https://stackoverflow.com/a/25329157/3701346)
"application": it takes an input of "abstraction", and an input of "lambda expression", results in an "lambda expression".
"abstraction" is called "abstraction" because in usual function definition, we abbreviate the (commonly longer) function body into a much shorter form, i.e. a function identifier followed by a list of formal parameters. (Though lambda abstractions are anonymous functions, other functions usually do have name.)
"variable" <=> "symbol" <=> "reference"
a "variable" is associated with a "value" via a process called "binding".
"constant" ∈ "variable"
"literal" ∈ "value"
"formal parameter" ∈ "variable"
"actual parameter"(argument) ∈ "value"
A "variable" can have a "value" of "data"
=> e.g. variable "a" has a value of 3
A "variable"can also have a "value" of "a set of instructions"
=> e.g. an operator "+" is a variable
"value": it is the actual data or instructions stored in computer.
You're trying to think of it very concretely in terms of the machine, which I'm afraid may confuse you. It's better to think of it in terms of math: a value is just a thing that never changes, like the number 42, the letter 'H', or the sequence of letters that constitutes "Hello world".
Another way to think of it is in terms of mental models. We invent mental models in order to reason indirectly about the world; by reasoning about the mental models, we make predictions about things in the real world. We write computer programs to help us work with these mental models reliably and in large volumes.
Values are then things in the mental model. The bits and bytes are just encodings of the model into the computer's architecture.
"variable": it is a way locating the data, a value-replacing reference , but not itself the set of data or instruction stored in computer.
A variable is just a name that stands for a value in a certain scope of the program. Every time a variable is evaluated, its value needs to be looked up in an environment. There are several implementations of this concept in computer terms:
A stack frame in an eager language is an implementation of an environment for looking up the values of local variable, on each invocation of a routine.
A linker provides environments for looking up global-scope names when a program is compiled or loaded into memory.
"abstraction" <=> "function" ∈ syntactic form.
Abstraction and function are not equivalent. In the lambda calculus, "abstraction" a type of syntactic expression, but a function is a value.
One analogy that's not too shabby is names and descriptions vs. things. Names and descriptions are part of language, while things are part of the world. You could say that the meaning of a name or description is the thing that it names or describes.
Languages contain both simple names for things (e.g., 12 is a name for the number twelve) and more complex descriptions of things (5 + 7 is a description of the number twelve). A lambda abstraction is a description of a function; e.g., the expression \x -> x + 7 is a description of the function that adds seven to its argument.
The trick is that when descriptions get very complex, it's not easy to figure out what thing they're describing. If I give you 12345 + 67890, you need to do some amount of work to figure out what number I just described. Computers are machines that do this work way faster and more reliably than we can do it.
"application": it takes an input of "abstraction", and an input of "lambda expression", results in an "lambda expression".
An application is just an expression with two subexpressions, which describes a value by this means:
The first subexpression stands for a function.
The second subexpression stands for some value.
The application as a whole stands for the value that results for applying the function in (1) to the value from (2).
In formal semantics (and don't be scared of that word) we often use the double brackets ⟦∙⟧ to stand for "the meaning of"; e.g. ⟦dog⟧ = "the meaning of dog." Using that notation:
⟦e1 e2⟧ = ⟦e1⟧(⟦e2⟧)
where e1 and e2 are any two expressions or terms (any variable, abstraction or application).
"abstraction" is called "abstraction" because in usual function definition, we abbreviate the (commonly longer) function body into a much shorter form, i.e. a function identifier followed by a list of formal parameters. (Though lambda abstractions are anonymous functions, other functions usually do have name.)
To tell you the truth, I've never stopped to think whether the term "abstraction" is a good term for this or why it was picked. Generally, with math, it doesn't pay to ask questions like that unless the terms have been very badly picked and mislead people.
"constant" ∈ "variable"
"literal" ∈ "value"
The lambda calculus, in and of itself, doesn't have the concepts of "constant" nor "literal." But one way to define these would be:
A literal is an expression that, because of the rules of the language, always has the same value no matter where it occurs.
A constant, in a purely functional language, is a variable at the topmost scope of a program. Every (non-shadowed) use of that variable will always have the same value in the program.
"formal parameter" ∈ "variable"
"actual parameter"(argument) ∈ "value"
Formal parameter is one kind of use of a variable. In any expression of the form λv.e (where v is a variable and e is an expression), v is a formal variable.
An argument is any expression (not value!) that occurs as the second subexpression of an application.
A "variable" can have a "value" of "data" => e.g. variable "a" has a value of 3
All expressions have values, not just variables. For example, 5 + 7 is an application, and it has the value of twelve.
A "variable"can also have a "value" of "a set of instructions" => e.g. an operator "+" is a variable
The value of + is a function—it's the function that adds its arguments. The set of instructions is an implementation of that function.
Think of a function as an abstract table that says, for each combination of argument values, what the result is. The way the instructions come in is this:
For a lot of functions we cannot literally implement them as a table. In the case of addition it's because the table would be infinitely large.
Even for functions where we can enumerate the cases, we want to implement them much more briefly and efficiently.
But the way you check whether a function implementation is correct is, in some sense, to check that in every case it does the same thing the "infinite table" would do. Two sets of instructions that both check out in this way are really two different implementations of the same function.
The word "abstraction" is used because we can't "look inside" a function and see what's going on for the most part so it's "abstract" (contrast with "concrete"). Application is the process of applying a function to an argument. This means that its body is run, but with the thing that's being applied to it replacing the argument name (avoiding any capture). Hopefully this example will explain better than I can (in Haskell syntax. \ represents lambda):
(\x -> x + x) 5 <=> 5 + 5
Here we are applying the lambda expression on the left to the value 5 on the right. We get 5 + 5 as our result (which then may be further reduced to 10).
A "reference" might refer to something somewhat different in the context of Haskell (IORefs and STRefs), but, internally, all bindings ("variables") in Haskell have a layer of indirection like references in other languages (actually, they have even more indirection than that in a way because of the non-strict evaluation).
This mostly looks okay except for the reference issue I mentioned above.
In Haskell, there isn't really a distinction between a variable and a constant.
A "literal" usually is specifically a constructor for a value. For example, 20 constructs the the number 20, but a function application (\x -> 2 * x) 10 wouldn't be considered a literal for 20 because it has an extra step before you get the value.
Right, not all variables are parameters. A parameter is something that is passed to a function. The xs in the lambda expressions above are examples of parameters. A non-example would be something like let a = 15 in a * a. a is a "variable" but not a parameter. Actually, I would call a a "binding" here because it can never change or take on a different value (vary).
The formal parameter vs actual parameter part looks about right.
That looks okay.
I would say that a variable can be a function instead. Usually, in functional programming, we typically think in terms of functions and function applications instead of lists of instructions.
I'd like to point out also that you might get in trouble by thinking of functions as just syntactic forms. You can create new functions by applying certain kinds of higher order functions without using one of the syntactic forms to construct a function directly. A simple example of this is function composition, (.) in Haskell
(f . g) x = f (g x) -- Definition of (.)
(* 10) . (+ 1) <=> \x -> ((* 10) ((+ 1) x)) <=> \x -> 10 * (x + 1)
Writing it as (* 10) . (+ 1) doesn't directly use the lambda syntax or the function definition syntax to create the new function.
I've read definition of these 2 notions on wiki, but the difference is still not clear. Could someone give examples and some easy explanation?
A declarative specification describes an operation or a function with a constraint that relates the output to the input. Rather than giving you a recipe for computing the output, it gives you a rule for checking that the output is correct. For example, consider a function that takes an array a and a value e, and returns the index of an element of the array matching e. A declarative specification would say exactly that:
function index (a, e)
returns i such that a[i] = e
In contrast, an operational specification would look like code, eg with a loop through the indices to find i. Note that declarative specifications are often non-deterministic; in this case, if e matches more than one element of e, there are several values of i that are valid (and the specification doesn't say which to return). This is a powerful feature. Also, declarative specifications are often not total: here, for example, the specification assumes that such an i exists (and in some languages you would add a precondition to make this explicit).
To support declarative specification, a language must generally provide logical operators (especially conjunction) and quantifiers.
A model-based language is one that uses standard mathematical structures (such as sets and relations) to describe the state. Alloy and Z are both model based. In contrast, algebraic languages (such as OBJ and Larch) use equations to describe state implicitly. For example, to specify an operation that inserts an element in a set, in an algebraic language you might write something like
member(insert(s,e),x) = (e = x) or member(s,x)
which says that after you insert e into s, the element x will be a member of the set if you just inserted that element (e is equal to x) or if it was there before (x is a member of s). In contrast, in a language like Z or Alloy you'd write something like
insert (s, e)
s' = s U {e}
with a constraint relating the new value of the set (s') to the old value (s).
For many examples of declarative, model-based specification, see the materials on Alloy at http://alloy.mit.edu, or my book Software Abstractions. You can also see comparisons between model-based declarative languages through an example in the appendix of the book, available at the book's website http://softwareabstractions.org.
I'm confused about how binding works for statically scoped variables in nested subroutines.
proc A:
var a, x
...
proc B:
var x, y
...
proc B2:
var a, b
...
end B2
end B
proc C:
var x, z, w
....
end C
end A
First, this is what I have understood: if static scoping is considered, then B2 can use the variable x and y present in its parent B. Similarly C can use the variable a used in proc A.
Now, my questions are: are these bindings made during the compile-time or run-time? Does it make a difference if the variables are statically scoped or dynamically scoped?
Until it comes naturally, I find it easy to draw environment model diagrams. They are also pretty much essential for exams and those esoteric examples that are intended to be confusing. I suggest the famous SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/), but there are obviously more than enough resources on the internet (a quick google brought me to this: http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~gelbart/cs61a/EnvDiagrams.pdf).
It depends on the language/implementation when/how bindings are done, however in your example the bindings can be done at compile time. In general, static scoping, as the name suggests allows for a lot of static/compile-time binding. A compiler can look into a function and see all references and resolve them immediately. For example in B2, a reference to y can be resolved immediately to belong to the enclosing scope, i.e. that of B.
As per dynamic vs. static scoping, there is a huge difference. Dynamic, as the name suggests, is much harder to do compile-time bindings with, since the structure of the code does not define the references to the variables. Different paths of execution may yield different bindings. You'll have to be more specific with the question though.
From WolframAlpha: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Function.html
"While this notation is deprecated by professional mathematicians, it is the more familiar one for most nonprofessionals. Therefore, unless indicated otherwise by context, the notation is taken in this work to be a shorthand for the more rigorous ."
Referring to f(x) being deprecated in favor of f:x->f(x).
I thought this was interesting because I've been familiar with:
function name(arg)
In all my years of middle school through high school, I have never seen functions with any other notation, what is the benefit of using f:x->f(x) instead of f(x)? If f(x) really is deprecated, why do programming languages continue to use a similar syntax?
You're taking the quote out of context. The page says "However, especially in more introductory texts, the notation f(x) is commonly used to refer to the function f itself (as opposed to the value of the function evaluated at x). In this context, the argument x is considered to be a dummy variable whose presence indicates that the function f takes a single argument (as opposed to f(x,y), etc.)" and then says that that's what deprecated.
In most programming languages f(x) refers to the function f evaluated with the argument x and writing f(x) when x is not defined is an error. So they don't use f(x) in its deprecated sense.
To refer to the function f itself, you'd use just f or lambda x: f(x) or something similar depending on the programming language.
Imagine a simple (made up) language where functions look like:
function f(a, b) = c + 42
where c = a * b
(Say it's a subset of Lisp that includes 'defun' and 'let'.)
Also imagine that it includes immutable objects that look like:
struct s(a, b, c = a * b)
Again analogizing to Lisp (this time a superset), say a struct definition like that would generate functions for:
make-s(a, b)
s-a(s)
s-b(s)
s-c(s)
Now, given the simple set up, it seems clear that there is a lot of similarity between what happens behind the scenes when you either call 'f' or 'make-s'. Once 'a' and 'b' are supplied at call/instantiate time, there is enough information to compute 'c'.
You could think of instantiating a struct as being like a calling a function, and then storing the resulting symbolic environment for later use when the generated accessor functions are called. Or you could think of a evaluting a function as being like creating a hidden struct and then using it as the symbolic environment with which to evaluate the final result expression.
Is my toy model so oversimplified that it's useless? Or is it actually a helpful way to think about how real languages work? Are there any real languages/implementations that someone without a CS background but with an interest in programming languages (i.e. me) should learn more about in order to explore this concept?
Thanks.
EDIT: Thanks for the answers so far. To elaborate a little, I guess what I'm wondering is if there are any real languages where it's the case that people learning the language are told e.g. "you should think of objects as being essentially closures". Or if there are any real language implementations where it's the case that instantiating an object and calling a function actually share some common (non-trivial, i.e. not just library calls) code or data structures.
Does the analogy I'm making, which I know others have made before, go any deeper than mere analogy in any real situations?
You can't get much purer than lambda calculus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus. Lambda calculus is in fact so pure, it only has functions!
A standard way of implementing a pair in lambda calculus is like so:
pair = fn a: fn b: fn x: x a b
first = fn a: fn b: a
second = fn a: fn b: b
So pair a b, what you might call a "struct", is actually a function (fn x: x a b). But it's a special type of function called a closure. A closure is essentially a function (fn x: x a b) plus values for all of the "free" variables (in this case, a and b).
So yes, instantiating a "struct" is like calling a function, but more importantly, the actual "struct" itself is like a special type of function (a closure).
If you think about how you would implement a lambda calculus interpreter, you can see the symmetry from the other side: you could implement a closure as an expression plus a struct containing the values of all the free variables.
Sorry if this is all obvious and you just wanted some real world example...
Both f and make-s are functions, but the resemblance doesn't go much further. Applying f calls the function and executes its code; applying make-s creates a structure.
In most language implementations and modelizations, make-s is a different kind of object from f: f is a closure, whereas make-s is a constructor (in the functional languages and logic meaning, which is close to the object oriented languages meaning).
If you like to think in an object-oriented way, both f and make-s have an apply method, but they have completely different implementations of this method.
If you like to think in terms of the underlying logic, f and make-s have a type build on the samme type constructor (the function type constructor), but they are constructed in different ways and have different destruction rules (function application vs. constructor application).
If you'd like to understand that last paragraph, I recommend Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C. Pierce. Structures are discussed in §11.8.
Is my toy model so oversimplified that it's useless?
Essentially, yes. Your simplified model basically boils down to saying that each of these operations involves performing a computation and putting the result somewhere. But that is so general, it covers anything that a computer does. If you didn't perform a computation, you wouldn't be doing anything useful. If you didn't put the result somewhere, you would have done work for nothing as you have no way to get the result. So anything useful you do with a computer, from adding two registers together, to fetching a web page, could be modeled as performing a computation and putting the result somewhere that it can be accessed later.
There is a relationship between objects and closures. http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg03277.html
The following creates what some might call a function, and others might call an object:
Taken from SICP ( http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-21.html )
(define (make-account balance)
(define (withdraw amount)
(if (>= balance amount)
(begin (set! balance (- balance amount))
balance)
"Insufficient funds"))
(define (deposit amount)
(set! balance (+ balance amount))
balance)
(define (dispatch m)
(cond ((eq? m 'withdraw) withdraw)
((eq? m 'deposit) deposit)
(else (error "Unknown request -- MAKE-ACCOUNT"
m))))
dispatch)