lambda ..

[Tril]

On Wed, 21 Oct 1998, Francois-Rene Rideau wrote:

> > What if I want
> > abstractions to implicitly define other operations besides substitution?
> I'm not sure what you hereby mean by "abstraction".

What I mean is how do I define new kinds of expressions that are not
lambdas, and new constructors that will create them?  Lambda-calc does not
allow me to reason about expressions themselves at the meta-level, that I
can see.  Any extensions to l.c. that did this could hardly be general
purpose enough for tunes.

> > If you can abstract ANY property, as you said in the web pages, Fare, why
> > must every property conform to a low-level "Search and replace" paradigm
> > of lambda?
> We should certainly be able to express other properties than lambdas.
> It's just that lambda (or rather, lambda-eval-quote) constitutes a minimal
> reflective logic with well-defined operational semantics (i.e. implementable),
> out of which we may build the rest.

What is minimal?  The language is minimal, so it requires its programs to
be very long?  Why don't we use Turing machines then?  I thought "many
ways to do the same thing" was important.

Anyway, I don't know how to build the tunes system from lambdas.  I ain't
discouraging you from doing it.  I just do not think well with lisp.  It
does not fit with my concept of TUNES.  That's my problem, not yours.

David Manifold <dem@tunes.org>