Lambda the Ultimate

Maybe it's time we recruited some more contributing editors. If you are a regular and want to join, let me know.

SIGAPL is showing signs of life. After skipping a year while a new slate of officers reorganized, *Quote Quad* (the SIGAPL newsletter) Volume 34, Number 1 appeared in my mail box. The SIG has fallen on some hard times, but I think it's well positioned for a comeback. With cheap, fast hardware and service oriented architectures, the productivity advantages of *Array Programming Languages* are compelling for some applications.

One of the gems squirreled away on Oleg's site is "Makefile as a functional language program":

"The language of GNU make is indeed functional, complete with combinators (map and filter), applications and anonymous abstractions. That is correct, GNU make supports lambda-abstractions."

Although I've classified this under Fun, Oleg exploits
the functional nature of Make for a real, practical application:

"...avoiding the explosion of makefile rules in a project that executes many test cases on many platforms. [...] Because GNU make turns out to be a functional programming system, we can reduce the number of rules from <number-of-targets> * <number-of-platforms> to just <number-of-targets> + <number-of-platforms>."

See the article for a code comparison
between make and Scheme, and check out the Makefile in question.

In my neverending quest to grasp continuations (stupidly, apart from actually trying to use them in a supporting language), I found this "continuation sandwich" example interesting.

I wrote down my thoughts on what I still don't understand. If anyone would be willing to comment there or here and help me to correct my still-confused understanding of continuations I'd be very grateful.