There are a few different meanings for "boxing" values in a programming language. Here are two:
- In a Scheme context, "boxing a value" will mean to have that value under a representation that has information about the type of the value. Constantly boxing and unboxing values will be bad for performance, so some good compilers try to keep values unboxed when possible.
- There is also the concept of "boxes" in some Scheme implementations
(See category-implementations ). Those are 1-tuples, and can be useful to
implement something akin to the concept of references (or "pointers") in Scheme.
- In a Java context, "boxing a value" will mean that you are wrapping a primitive type into an object type. For example: "Integer x = new Integer(42);"