Re: Recursion, Yo

On 12/04/2024 13:35, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 12.04.2024 09:34, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 12 Apr 2024 07:32:33 +0200, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
>

Ideally it would be (without syntactic ballast) just
>
      res = func;

>
Then there is no way to express a reference to the function itself, as
distinct from a call to it.
>
Unless you do what Algol 68 did, and introduce the “deproceduring
coercion”, analogous to “dereferencing” which allowed doing away with any
explicit “address of x” and “the thingy whose address is in x” constructs.

 It seems that's one of the fundamental differences between (low-level)
languages that want to provide such technical factors explicit to the
user and between languages that want to provide a higher abstraction.
 Algol 60, Pascal, Simula 67 and Algol 60, Eiffel, etc. all took that
approach.
 Languages syntactically derived from C or borrowed its syntax didn't.

You don't say anything about C itself. C sometimes is explicit and sometimes it isn't:
    &F;             // both take the address of a function F
    F;
    P();            // both call a function via a pointer P
    (*P)();
So you can use an explicit & or * operator, not not.