http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/137167381

LAMBDA: The Ultimate Declarative

In this paper, a sequel to LAMBDA: The Ultimate Imperative, a new view of LAMBDA as a renaming operator is presented and contrasted with the usual functional view taken by LISP. This view, combined with the view of function invocation as a kind of generalized GOTO, leads to several new insights into the nature of the LISP evaluation mechanism and the symmetry between form and function, evaluation and application, and control and environment. It also complements Hewitt's actors theory nicely, explaining the intent of environment manipulation as cleanly, generally, and intuitively as the actors theory explains control structures. The relationship between functional and continuation-passing styles of programming is also clarified.

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