# Lambda: The Ultimate Imperative/Introduction

People who like this sort of thing will find this is the sort of thing they like. — Abraham Lincoln

## IntroductionIntroduction

We catalogue a number of common programming constructs. For each construct we examine "typical" usage in well-known programming languages, and then capture the essence of the semantics of the construct in terms of a common meta-language.
The lambda calculus {Note Alonzowins} is often used as such a meta-language. Lambda calculus offers clean semantics, but it is clumsy because it was designed to be a minimal language rather than a convenient one. All lambda calculus "functions" must take exactly one "argument"; the only "data type" is lambda expressions; and the only "primitive operation" is variable substitution. While its utter simplicity makes lambda calculus ideal for logicians, it is too primitive for use by programmers. The meta-language we use is a programming language called SCHEME {Note Schemepaper} which is based on lambda calculus.
SCHEME is a dialect of LISP. [McCarthy 62] It is an expression-oriented, applicative order, interpreter-based language which allows one to manipulate programs as data. It differs from most current dialects of LISP in that it closes all lambda expressions in the environment of their definition or declaration, rather than in the execution environment. {Note Closures} This preserves the substitution semantics of lambda calculus, and has the consequence that all variables are lexically scoped, as in ALGOL. [Naur 63] Another difference is that SCHEME is implemented in such a way that tail-recursions execute without net growth of the interpreter stack. {Note Schemenote} We have chosen to use LISP syntax rather than, say, ALGOL syntax because we want to treat programs as data for the purpose of describing transformations on the code. LISP supplies names for the parts of an executable expression and standard operators for constructing expressions and extracting their components. The use of LISP syntax makes the structure of such expressions manifest. We use ALGOL as an expository language, because it is familiar to many people, but ALGOL is not sufficiently powerful to express the necessary concepts; in particular, it does not allow functions to return functions as values. We are thus forced to use a dialect of LISP in many cases.
We will consider various complex programming language constructs and show how to model them in terms of only a few simple ones. As far as possible we will use only three control constructs from SCHEME: LAMBDA expressions, as in LISP, which are just functions with lexically scoped free variables; LABELS, which allows declaration of mutually recursive procedures {Note Labelsdef}; and IF, a primitive conditional expression. For more complex modelling we will introduce an assignment primitive (ASET). We will freely assume the existence of other common primitives, such as arithmetic functions.
The constructs we will examine are divided into four broad classes. The first is Simple Loops; this contains simple recursions and iterations, and an introduction to the notion of continuations. The second is Imperative Constructs this includes compound statements, GO TO, and simple variable assignments. The third is Continuations, which encompasses the distinction ​between statements and expressions, escape operators (such as Landin's J-operator [Landin 65] and Reynold's escape expression [Reynolds 72]), and fluid (dynamically bound) variables. The fourth is Parameter Passing Mechanisms, such as ALGOL call-by-name and FORTRAN call-by-location.
Some of the models presented here are already well-known, particularly those for GO TO and assignment. [McCarthy 60] [Landin 65] [Reynolds 72] Those for escape operators, fluid variables, and call-by-need with side effects are new.