[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
[McCarthy's] aim was to use the mathematical
formalismus as languages and not as calculi. This is the root of
the historical fact that he never took the Lambda-Calculus conversion
rules as a sound basis for LISP implementation."
So, I believe it is not so briliant an idea to confound the Church calculus
with Lisp!
It's difficult to extricate the two, as Lisp & McCarthy's experience
shows. The decision to use lambda notation without the accompanying
semantics would have been fine if Lisp had not also had first-class
functions. But with first-class functions, and without lexical scoping
semantics, Lisp suffered from scoping bugs which were only resolved once
Lisp's 'lambda' was changed to follow Church's semantics, as Sussman and
Steele originally did for Scheme.
When CL adopted lexical scoping, it was seen as a choice, but it wasn't
really much of a choice. The choice was between continuing with a
fundamentally buggy language and working around those bugs somehow, or
fixing it by adopting Church's lexical scoping rules.
Wherever you look, you find plenty of occasions to
err, it suffices to put yourself in a mode of a dead person from the
movie "The sixth sense" of M. Night Shyamalan, with Bruce Willis, and
Haley Joel Osment.
I see dead languages...
Anton
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