Comment by doug-moen
11 hours ago
I am unable to extract any meaning from your post. You appear to be making a general claim: it is impossible to design a programming language where everything is a value. You at least admit that "data thingies" can be values. Are you claiming that it is not possible for functions to be values? (If we assume that the argument and the result of a function call is a value, then this would mean higher order functions are impossible, for example.) If not that, then what? Please give a specific example of something that can never be a value in any programming language that I care to design.
I think parent means it from a lambda calculus perspective. If you only have values at an AST level, then you only have a tree of.. values, like an XML document.
You can apply meaning to a particular shape of that tree which could be executed, but then you basically just added another layer before you parse your AST that becomes executable.