[erlang-questions] "Concurrent Programming in Erlang" (Second Edition) Query

[Luke]

Eval/Apply is a concept taken from Lisp

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/sicp/book/node77.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eval
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apply

Essentially, eval "executes" or "runs" S-expressions which then
return/evaluate-to something - maybe a number, maybe a string, maybe a
function. Apply means to apply a function to a list of parameters (or in
slightly different wording, run a function with some parameters). The
execution of a function program can be thought of as one continuous cycle
of eval/apply, for example we can eval some expression which results in a
function, this function then gets applied to some parameters, some of which
may themselves have been expressions we have already evaluated.


On Fri, Dec 15, 2017 at 9:46 AM, John Duffy <jb_duffy@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hi
>
> I'm learning Erlang with the help of "Concurrent Programming in Erlang"
> (Second Edition). Being an electrical engineer, I'm a bit stumped by the
> computer science terminology of the last paragraph of 2.3 Expression
> Evaluation:
>
> "The evaluator can be thought of as function E which reduces an expression
> to a ground term:  ... <E examples> ... where APPLY represents a function
> which applies a function to its arguments".
>
> If there is someone who has this book and can translate this paragraph and
> the examples into simple engineer speak I would be very grateful.
>
> Kind regards
>
> John
>
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20171215/f302e994/attachment.htm>