<blockquote what="official Lisp NYC announcement"> From: Heow Eide-Goodman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Lisp] Reminder: Lisp Meeting, June 14th 7:00 at Trinity
Please join us for our next meeting on Tuesday, June 14th from 7:00 to 9:00 at Trinity Lutheran Church. In the first installment of the "LispNYC: Best Presentations" Anton van Straaten re-presents "Lisp and the Lambda Calculus": Every Lisp programmer is familiar with the keyword LAMBDA. But what does it really mean, and where does it come from? When John McCarthy invented Lisp in 1958, he borrowed a notation for the representation of functions from a mathematical formalism known as lambda calculus. But although McCarthy borrowed aspects of the syntax of lambda calculus, he didn't quite get the semantics right at first. This led to one of Lisp's most longstanding and famous bugs: the funarg problem, relating to the difficulty of implementing functions as first-class values in a language. This talk takes a wild ride through the history of human thought about logic and computation, through the invention of lambda calculus and the invention of Lisp, the discovery of the funarg problem, its ultimate solution in the lambda calculus, and the adoption of that solution by Lisp and Scheme. Along the way, the lambda calculus will be explained and interactively demonstrated, in breathtaking clarity, using real code, showing the foundations of the basic logical constructs for which Lisp is famous. This is a must-see for both Lisp aficionados as well as anyone with an interest in programming language history. Knowledge of Lisp is helpful, but not necessary. Anton van Straaten is a software developer and consultant with a strong interest in the design and development of programming languages. His experience ranges from the development of successful programmer tools, to complex financial services applications. He has presented at MIT's Lightweight Languages Conference and the International Lisp Conference. His work on programmer tools and interest in languages has led him to study the formal foundations of programming languages. As part of this study, Anton developed SchemeDS (http://www.appsolutions.com/SchemeDS/), an executable version of the formal semantics of the Scheme language, the only such implementation publicly available. Directions to Trinity: Trinity Lutheran 602 E. 9th St. & Ave B., on Thomkins Square Park http://trinitylowereastside.org/ From N,R,Q,W (8th Street NYU Stop) and the 4,5 (Astor Street Stop): Walk East 4 blocks on St. Marks, cross Thomkins Square Park. From F&V (2nd Ave Stop): Walk E one or two blocks, turn north for 8 short blocks From L (1st Ave Stop): Walk E one block, turn sounth for 5 short blocks The M9 bus line drops you off at the doorstep and the M15 is near get off on St. Marks & 1st) To get there by car, take the FDR (East River Drive) to Houston then go NW till you're at 9th & B. Week-night parking isn't bad at all, but if you're paranoid about your Caddy or in a hurry, there is a parking garage on 9th between 1st and 3rd Ave. _______________________________________________ Lisp mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.lispnyc.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/lisp </blockquote> Distributed poC TINC: Jay Sulzberger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Corresponding Secretary LXNY LXNY is New York's Free Computing Organization. http://www.lxny.org _______________________________________________ Help-gnu-emacs mailing list Help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-gnu-emacs