Block Creation Vs. Evaluation

[bradrn]

@Brett

The conversation has moved on, but I thought I'd throw in a response to bradrn's earlier musing. BTW, hi bradrn!

Hi!

@Brett

When REBOL 2 was released many years back part of the conception was that code, a dialect, to be evaluated might arrive via email or a network port. The dialect would be safe through being a controlled language. How to evaluate it? … I've had an intuition for a long time that rebol blocks should start life unbound.

Now this is a fascinating idea! I was thinking about binding purely in terms of scoping of names within one program, but you’re right that it has entirely different advantages too.

@Brett

Very recently I came across two languages that echo this sentiment of code starting out dead and selectively being brought to life.

To this list of examples you can add WebAssembly — a bytecode which by default cannot interact with the outside world, but requires callers to explicitly import functions into it. (I saw this great article about it just the other day: missing the point of webassembly — wingolog .)