An argument from Justine Tunney's LC implementation [1]: > Programs written in the binary lambda calculus are outrageously small. For example, its metacircula

An argument from Justine Tunney's LC implementation [1]: > Programs written in the binary lambda calculus are outrageously small. For example, its metacircular evaluator is 232 bits. [...] Something like this could have practical applications in compression formats, which need a small busy beaver that can produce large amounts of data. It's also just downright cool. > For example, if you built a compression tool you could have it encode a file as a lambda expression that generates it. Since it's difficult to introduce a new compression format that most people haven't installed, you could prefix the compressed file with this 383 byte interpreter to get autonomous self-extracting archives that anyone can use. I partway expect @tromp to show up in this thread, but see his excellent site[2] for discussion of the algorithmic information theoretical applications of LC, exploration of Kolmogorov complexity, etc. 1. https://justine.lol/lambda/ 2. https://tromp.github.io/cl/cl.html [edit: spelling]