logical symbols

[Tril]

On Tue, 27 Oct 1998, RE01 Rice Brian T. EM2 wrote:

> [...] An intuition for this idea would be the reduction of the
> programming system to "direct object manipulation".  [...]
> I am essentially arguing against any system requiring alpha-conversion,
> because I wish to reduce/eliminate the dependence on particular
> representations.

Direct object manipulation is good.  Needing alpha conversion is bad.
I agree with what you are doing.

> This also explains my distinction between "extension" and "intension",
> in that the extension of a symbol which is used any number of times
> within an expression is the entity which remains "the same" for each
> occurrence.

You explained 'extension' but not 'intension'.

> [uncountable stuff]

Ok, you're talking about infinite loops, infinite sets, etc.  I agree
these have to be recognized as infinite and not fully evaluated.  It
should be easy to prove loops/sets are infinite by detecting whether there
is recursion in the definition.

David Manifold <dem@tunes.org>