Comment by quietbritishjim
3 days ago
> It's interesting to think of "calling" as "summoning" functions. We could also reasonably say "instantiating", ...
"instantiating" would be a poor choice of word because in some languages you instantiate a function object when execution passes the point in the code where the function is declared, which is a separate step from calling it later. Examples are lambda expressions in C++ and all functions in Python. In those cases some state is captured at the tone of instantiation time.
Yes, and in Prolog you instantiate logic variables when you assign a value to them, so it would be a bad term in Prolog too.