Routines



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Routines

Routines (procedures and iterators) are immutable. They have only "equal", "similar", "copy", and "unparse" methods. The "equal" and "similar" methods have weak definitions (see below); they are provided mainly so that structure and collection types that contain them can have these methods. E.g., "record"s of type

  record[i: int, p: proc(int) returns(int)]
will have "equal" and "similar" methods, since both field types have these methods.

Methods for routine type "rt"

  equal (p: rt) returns (bool)
  similar (p: rt) returns (bool)
      % effects   if a call returns true, then self and p are guaranteed to be
      %           indistinguishable:  they return the same results for calls with
      %           equal arguments and have the same side \tex{effects} for those calls.
      %           if the call of equal or similar returns false, there are no
      %           guarantees:  self and p might or might not be indistinguishable.

  copy ( ) returns (rt)
      % effects   returns self.

  unparse ( ) returns (string)
      % effects   Returns a string that indicates whether this routine is a procedure or an
      %           iterator.  The implementation is free to put more information about the
      %           routine (for example the routine signature) in the returned string.


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