> As one might imagine, a naïve implementation of this spec would be extremely slow (for example, decrementing n requires incrementing another variable m in a l

> As one might imagine, a naïve implementation of this spec would be extremely slow (for example, decrementing n requires incrementing another variable m in a loop until m+1==n, which is O(n)). Yeah, see that seems to go way too far, but then again this stood out as similar to ideas I've had: > The algorithm for decrementing an atom is to count up to it, an O(n) operation. But if the interpreter knows it's running a decrement formula, it can use the CPU to decrement directly. I had basically the same idea, only since my ideas still look a lot more like an instruction set it was in the form of explicit annotations to identify functions that could be replaced with a specialized instruction if available. I'll have to look into this thing. Thanks.