[Grace-core] Edited Variable & Constant page

[James Noble]

> It took me twenty years to understand the Simula view of things:  
> that object are just activation records that outlive their callers.   
> In that view, fields and temps are indeed the same thing.

yeah me too. actually I think I probably understood in when I managed  
to read the BETA book.
(And then I used to set "Hierarchical Program Structures" as the first  
reading in my honours
course - mostly to scare people away from the course...

> Thank God, Alan Kay both understood the power of Simula, and was  
> able to explain it to the rest of us with a model that made objects  
> first class, and not an accident of a generalized implementation.   
> That was  Good Idea, with capital letters.  It  was what made the  
> object model succeed.  Now no one, other than language implementor  
> types, and Erik Ernst, need care about activation records.

yes.  well almost.  how general were our lambdas again?

> So please, lets keep that little secret to ourselves, and not let it  
> influence the semantics, syntax or description of Grace.  OK?

:-)


> And that is the reason not to like const as a keyword, but not to  
> reject the whole idea of fixed bindings.  Did I convince you to  
> consider set?

right and yes.  Actually you almost had me considering "let" for both.
another option is field/set for fields, and  var/let for locals?

btw, I've coped what I thought where the most apposite bits of this  
discussion into the wiki
I plan to do some more of that tomorrow (and post out Basic Types  
Gracenote)

J