3 ms·

Ruby/YARV bytecode compiler for λ-calculus

12 points by cstrahan 12y ago

JadeNB 12y ago
Needs more combinators! It's already got Y, so why not SKI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus) or BCKW (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B,C,K,W_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B,C,K,W_system)? (I'm not sure if it's kosher to link to it—if not, then please let me know and I'll remove it—but I implemented a SKI combinator reducer in Perl regexes a while back: http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=809842 http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=809842 .)
- cstrahan 12y ago
  Nice! I'll have to read that in full later tonight - thanks for sharing! This was mostly just me trying to wrap my head around Church encodings and such, but I could surely do with a couple more combinators in there :).
  - JadeNB 12y ago
    Just a warning: at least for me, once I got started, it became addictive to try, Oulipo-like (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo), to write simple programmes in these ever-more-restrictive languages. I was helped along immensely by Hindley–Seldin (http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/computer-science/programming-languages-and-applied-logic/lambda-calculus-and-combinators-introduction-2nd-edition http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/computer-scien...) and, for, as one would expect, a more friendly but still thoroughly mathematical introduction, Smullyan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Mock_a_Mockingbird http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Mock_a_Mockingbird). I am not alone in my admiration for the latter; see, for example, http://www.angelfire.com/tx4/cus/combinator/birds.html http://www.angelfire.com/tx4/cus/combinator/birds.html. EDIT to add: Speaking of 'Mockingbird' articles, you may be interested in Appendix A of http://dkeenan.com/Lambda/index.htm http://dkeenan.com/Lambda/index.htm, whose author discusses another interpretation, attributed there to Barendregt, of Booleans and numerals. For someone who regards the Church encoding as 'intuitive', they were very surprising!
avmich 12y ago
Esoterrorism is at the end of http://codon.com/programming-with-nothing http://codon.com/programming-with-nothing - nice FizzBuzz version... What is YARV? :)
- cstrahan 12y ago
  Yet Another Ruby VM - the "official" Ruby interpreter, if you will (also known as Matz's Ruby, or MRI). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YARV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YARV Yeah, Tom Stuart is great - that's where I got the idea to create this.

12 points by cstrahan 12y ago

Needs more combinators! It's already got Y, so why not SKI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus) or BCKW (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B,C,K,W_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B,C,K,W_system)? (I'm not sure if it's kosher to link to it—if not, then please let me know and I'll remove it—but I implemented a SKI combinator reducer in Perl regexes a while back: http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=809842 http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=809842 .)

cstrahan 12y ago
Nice! I'll have to read that in full later tonight - thanks for sharing! This was mostly just me trying to wrap my head around Church encodings and such, but I could surely do with a couple more combinators in there :).
- JadeNB 12y ago
  Just a warning: at least for me, once I got started, it became addictive to try, Oulipo-like (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo), to write simple programmes in these ever-more-restrictive languages. I was helped along immensely by Hindley–Seldin (http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/computer-science/programming-languages-and-applied-logic/lambda-calculus-and-combinators-introduction-2nd-edition http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/computer-scien...) and, for, as one would expect, a more friendly but still thoroughly mathematical introduction, Smullyan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Mock_a_Mockingbird http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Mock_a_Mockingbird). I am not alone in my admiration for the latter; see, for example, http://www.angelfire.com/tx4/cus/combinator/birds.html http://www.angelfire.com/tx4/cus/combinator/birds.html. EDIT to add: Speaking of 'Mockingbird' articles, you may be interested in Appendix A of http://dkeenan.com/Lambda/index.htm http://dkeenan.com/Lambda/index.htm, whose author discusses another interpretation, attributed there to Barendregt, of Booleans and numerals. For someone who regards the Church encoding as 'intuitive', they were very surprising!

avmich 12y ago

Esoterrorism is at the end of http://codon.com/programming-with-nothing http://codon.com/programming-with-nothing - nice FizzBuzz version... What is YARV? :)

cstrahan 12y ago
Yet Another Ruby VM - the "official" Ruby interpreter, if you will (also known as Matz's Ruby, or MRI). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YARV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YARV Yeah, Tom Stuart is great - that's where I got the idea to create this.