anonymous functions

[Wayne A. Throop]

> chris at mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek)

Once again, Chris writes the exact article I had in mind, only better
than I might have done it.  I have only one nit to pick.  In telling 
"what good are they" of anonymous functions, Chris says:

> As for uses, anonymous functions are much like anonymous aggregates:
> you use them to pass to other functions, or to set local variables
> (in C, pointers to functions).

... which is exactly correct, but he omits giving a convincing example,
like to supply a signal handler routine that just sets an external bit,
or a compare or swap routine for a qsort, or a hash routine for a table
manipulation routine, or whatever.  The point is, why name this little
bit of code that is required to be a function because of the way the
library is organized?  When extremely short as in these examples, giving
it a name is silly and wastefull.

Example invocations:

        signal( SIGINT, void (int sig){ interrupted = 1; } );

        qsort( (void *)tbl, n_elt, n_elt*sizeof(tbl_elt_t),
               int (void *a, void *b){
                   return( strcmp( (tbl_elt_t *)a->name, 
                                   (tbl_elt_t *)b->name ) ); } );

	/* crummy hash function, but good enough for whatever purpose: */
        hfind( name, table, int (char *s){ return(*s); } );

--
He wonders if he too might have made a similar mistake.
        --- "Seen and Not Seen" by Talking Heads from "Remain in Light"
-- 
Wayne Throop      <the-known-world>!mcnc!rti!xyzzy!throopw