Funarg problem - Definition

Funarg is an abbreviation for "functional argument"; in computer science, the funarg problem relates to the difficulty of implementing functions as first-class citizen objects in stack-based programming language implementations.

There are two subtly different versions of the funarg problem:

• The upwards funarg problem is the problem of passing a function as a value returned "upwards" from a function call
• The downwards funarg problem is the problem of passing a function value as a parameter "down" into another function call

In both of these cases, the problem relates to correctly passing the function's environment together with the function's code.

Full-featured functional languages do not have either of these problems, at the cost of not being able to use simple stack-based activation records in the general case.

See also

• activation record
• spaghetti stack
• closure
• shallow binding
• deep binding
• referential transparency
• dynamic scoping
• static scoping
• lexical scoping
• functional programming
• lambda calculus
• stack-oriented programming language

External link

• Bindings, Procedures, Functions, Functional Programming, and the Lambda Calculus (http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~abadi/CS203_S04/l6.pdf)