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Can you explain what you mean by ‘holes for areas like that’? I assume the area you are referring to is lists as code, but I don’t understand what you are sayin

Can you explain what you mean by ‘holes for areas like that’? I assume the area you are referring to is lists as code, but I don’t understand what you are saying by claiming there needs to be a hole for it.

runevault 4y ago
By a hole I mean places where it doesn't require strict typing. For example in most static languages everything is typed to some degree. Some cases they abuse things like "just make it an object" but to me that has always felt an unfortunate hole that I wish wasn't necessary but I dunno how you get around some form of it in cases like param arrays or this code as data issue.
- throwaway17_17 4y ago
  I get it, sorry, I kind of defaulted to a more specific concept of hole in a type theoretic context. Code as data is, while not simple in a type theoretic context, pretty well researched. I think the most promising method for achieving semantics relatively close to Lisp's `code type` is the modal type theory work from the early 2000's. It starts (according to most accounts) with Pfenning and Davies work from '94-'95 [1], then moves over to Taha,Sheard,et al's work circa 2000 on MetaML[2]. Then I think the work by Kim, et al in 2006[3] which led to Murase's work in 2017[4]. This line of work delves pretty deeply into the proof-theoretic foundations and type-theoretic of macros as a well founded element of programming languages. However, I am a firm believer in the theory of best fit for this sort of problem. A large amount of the work is based on a relatively small amount of primitive concepts, and in a language like Lisp with imperative features and mutable state, a safe implementation that is algorithmically checkable should be possible, without attempting to prove the categorical semantics of the construct. Long story short, I think that a 'safe' and useable typed syntactic macro construct should not be thought of as intractable, but approached with sensible guide rails to implementation and then used as needed by developers. [1] - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/237721.237788 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/237721.237788 (A Modal Analysis of Staged Computation [Davies,Pfenning 2001] [2] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304397500000530/pdf?md5=30c03faf3942c17373ac0dcbb708ee7c&pid=1-s2.0-S0304397500000530-main.pdf https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030439750... (MetaML and multi-stage programming with explicit annotations [Taha,Sheard 2000] [3] - http://kwangkeunyi.snu.ac.kr/paper/06-popl-kiyicr.pdf http://kwangkeunyi.snu.ac.kr/paper/06-popl-kiyicr.pdf (A Polymorphic Modal Type System for Lisp-Like Multi-Staged Languages [Kim,etal 2006]) [4] - https://lfmtp.org/workshops/2017/inc/slides/murase.pdf https://lfmtp.org/workshops/2017/inc/slides/murase.pdf (slides from a talk)

runevault 4y ago

By a hole I mean places where it doesn't require strict typing. For example in most static languages everything is typed to some degree. Some cases they abuse things like "just make it an object" but to me that has always felt an unfortunate hole that I wish wasn't necessary but I dunno how you get around some form of it in cases like param arrays or this code as data issue.

throwaway17_17 4y ago
I get it, sorry, I kind of defaulted to a more specific concept of hole in a type theoretic context. Code as data is, while not simple in a type theoretic context, pretty well researched. I think the most promising method for achieving semantics relatively close to Lisp's `code type` is the modal type theory work from the early 2000's. It starts (according to most accounts) with Pfenning and Davies work from '94-'95 [1], then moves over to Taha,Sheard,et al's work circa 2000 on MetaML[2]. Then I think the work by Kim, et al in 2006[3] which led to Murase's work in 2017[4]. This line of work delves pretty deeply into the proof-theoretic foundations and type-theoretic of macros as a well founded element of programming languages. However, I am a firm believer in the theory of best fit for this sort of problem. A large amount of the work is based on a relatively small amount of primitive concepts, and in a language like Lisp with imperative features and mutable state, a safe implementation that is algorithmically checkable should be possible, without attempting to prove the categorical semantics of the construct. Long story short, I think that a 'safe' and useable typed syntactic macro construct should not be thought of as intractable, but approached with sensible guide rails to implementation and then used as needed by developers. [1] - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/237721.237788 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/237721.237788 (A Modal Analysis of Staged Computation [Davies,Pfenning 2001] [2] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304397500000530/pdf?md5=30c03faf3942c17373ac0dcbb708ee7c&pid=1-s2.0-S0304397500000530-main.pdf https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030439750... (MetaML and multi-stage programming with explicit annotations [Taha,Sheard 2000] [3] - http://kwangkeunyi.snu.ac.kr/paper/06-popl-kiyicr.pdf http://kwangkeunyi.snu.ac.kr/paper/06-popl-kiyicr.pdf (A Polymorphic Modal Type System for Lisp-Like Multi-Staged Languages [Kim,etal 2006]) [4] - https://lfmtp.org/workshops/2017/inc/slides/murase.pdf https://lfmtp.org/workshops/2017/inc/slides/murase.pdf (slides from a talk)