History Of Code In Structures

Does anybody know the history of code in data structures? Roughly every 6 months it seems it comes up.

Discussion snippet based on content from BenefitsOfOo:

In DoubleDispatchExample, your 'relational weenie' example implements OOP techniques and stores (or references) the scripts/functions for each 'printer object' within the RDBMS.

You mean code or references to code in data structures? OO has no monopoly on that. Lisp was doing it about 7 years before the first OOP language. I'm not sure what paradigm we should give that credit to. Perhaps none owns it. It's easy to do in most machine languages by changing the execution "pointer" offset or address. It basically made no formal distinction between code and data. Later languages made the technique more difficult, subtracting that ability, perhaps fearing it made programs less predictable. Formal separation between code and data thus is perhaps a BondageAndDisciplineLanguage feature rather than the "norm". OOP in "static" languages is a newer attempt to bring it back with some form of control.

CategoryMetaprogramming, CategoryHistory