Partial application in C

[Henry Spencer]

> Besides, I thought that self-modifying code was (a) extremely difficult
> to write, and (b) considered poor programming practice.

Don't think of self-modifying code, which is indeed an abomination.  Think
of code that generates other code at execution time.  For example, the
fastest implementations of RasterOp generate custom-built code at run time,
and then execute it, when the rasters being manipulated are big.  Various
incremental compiler/interpreter hybrids are another obvious example --
done well, dynamic code generation can give near-compiler speeds without
sacrificing the advantages of an interpreter.