[Grace-core] Fwd: Some notes on pattern matching on the wiki

[Andrew P. Black]

On 5 Jul 2011, at 0:11, James Noble wrote:

> Newspeak & Self say "everything is a message send" and have a self-consistent
> (albeit occasionally tortured)  conceptual model to justify that. 

It really is rather tortured.   I don't buy it for Grace, much as I respect both Ungar and Bracha.

Here is my point of view.

The idea of lexical binding is rather an important one in Programming Languages.  It's something that students should meet, and they should meet it early on.  Since we are OO bigots, we also believe that they should meet dynamic binding early on.  So Grace should provide a vehicle for teaching both.

Is if better to teach them as two different concepts, or to try to explain lexical binding as a tortured version of dynamic dispatch?  Even if one succeeds in doing the latter, how does that understanding of lexical binding carry over to another language, like Algol 60 or ML?

	Andrew