Question

A programming language without functions is a poor programming language indeed.

Fortunately, it is not hard to add a fun construct, which treats its last argument as the function’s body and treats all the arguments before that as the names of the function’s arguments.

specialForms["fun"] = function(args, env) {
  if (!args.length)
    throw new SyntaxError("Functions need a body");
  function name(expr) {
    if (expr.type != "word")
      throw new SyntaxError("Arg names must be words");
    return expr.name;
  }
  var argNames = args.slice(0, args.length - 1).map(name);
  var body = args[args.length - 1];

  return function() {
    if (arguments.length != argNames.length)
      throw new TypeError("Wrong number of arguments");
    var localEnv = Object.create(env);
    for (var i = 0; i < arguments.length; i++)
      localEnv[argNames[i]] = arguments[i];
    return evaluate(body, localEnv);
  };
};

Functions in Egg have their own local environment, just like in JavaScript. We use Object.create to make a new object that has access to the variables in the outer environment (its prototype) but that can also contain new variables without modifying that outer scope.

The function created by the fun form creates this local environment and adds the argument variables to it. It then evaluates the function body in this environment and returns the result.

run("do(define(plusOne, fun(a, +(a, 1))),",
    "   print(plusOne(10)))");
// → 11

run("do(define(pow, fun(base, exp,",
    "     if(==(exp, 0),",
    "        1,",
    "        *(base, pow(base, -(exp, 1)))))),",
    "   print(pow(2, 10)))");
// → 1024

This is a book about getting computers to do what you want them to do. Computers are about as common as screwdrivers today, but they contain a lot more hidden complexity and thus are harder to operate and understand. To many, they remain alien, slightly threatening things.