4 ms·
I would guess the SK combinators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus
by inimino 6y ago
I would guess the SK combinators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus
- bsaul 6y agoThanks, that was the one. This looks like a more fundamental axiomatic than lisp meta-circular evaluator. I'm surprised it didn't give birth to more experimentation (maybe because i remember it had some very weird properties and things that looked a lot like inconsistencies..)
- arethuza 6y ago"very weird properties and things that looked a lot like inconsistencies" Any idea what they were - as my final year project of my CS degree I did an implementation of a simple purely functional programming language that macro expanded into lambda calculus and then was converted into various sets of combinators for evaluation (from SK upwards). I thought there was actually a stunning lack of weirdness and inconsistency - mind you this did also come with a stunning lack of performance! NB The trickiest bit of the whole project was writing a garbage collector so I could actually get these things to run on a shared Unix mini-computer.... Edit: Getting Y (and therefore recursion) working purely in terms of SK still amazes me.
- bsaul 6y agoI think to remember something about being able to compute the fixed point of the function x -> x+1 (that is, a number for which this function returns the same number). Our teacher showed us this function, and i think he also told us, curry reaction when people showed him this was something along the line of « well, that just means my theory is more powerful than yours, because it can express things yours can’t ». that was 20 years ago, but it made a big impression on me, so i think my memories are correct :)