Re: Self-awareness of functions?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 9:22 AM, Dirk Laurie <dpl@sun.ac.za> wrote:
> A standard name like "self" which makes the function aware of itself,
> would be useful:
>
> function(x) if x<2 then return 1 else return x*self(x-1) end end

But this use of self is immediately going to conflict with implicit
self generation in methods.

How about just this?

local fact
function fact(n)
   if n == 2 return 2 else return n*fact(n-1) end
end

Works because the statement  'function F(...)' is sugar for 'F =
function(...)'  and so is just assigning to a predeclared local
variable.

steve d.