Comment by galaxyLogic
5 hours ago
Yes, and as you point out even conditional statements.
In Smalltalk constructs like
b ifTrue: [ ... ]
mean that the boolean value 'b' has its method (-function) ifTrue: called with the argument [...] which is a "closure" meaning it is a free-standing function (as opposed to bound functions which are the methods).
There are similarly library methods in class Boolean for whileTrue: etc. Functions all the way.
What would be the point of implementing conditional statements as methods/functions? It makes it posssible to extend the set of conditional statements to for instance 3-valued logic by adding a method #ifTrue:ifFalse:ifUnknown: . And of course it makes the syntax of the language very simple.
Right.. So not only all data structures and operators, but all kinds of control flow can be described as functions. What an interesting way to look at programs, I'll study more in this direction.
I wonder how languages support this question of "unevaluated arguments", like in the `if` conditional function. I guess in Lisp(s) they're simply quoted expressions, and in the above Smalltalk example, it sounds like the syntax [...] calls a function with lazily evaluated arguments.