On Mon, 2009-08-24 at 15:55 -0400, John Cowan wrote: > > You (separately) asked what characters from ASCII I would omit > > requiring: any that aren't part of the lexical language, is the > answer.
> Exactly five, then. It hardly seems worth it. Don't be silly. > > By "of the essence" I mean that I just want the definition of small > > scheme to capture some basic properties of lambda and some > invariants > > for basic data types and a some minimal form of syntactic > extensiblity > > (hygiene not being high on the priority list but flexibility is). > > Why bother with data types? Lambda does it all. And if you want pure > lambda calculus, you know where to find it. Hey, if you started with a kind of pure, applicative lambda calculus you could indeed build effective models of Scheme's basic types and mutations. As a purely intellectual exercise, sure why not define "mu-scheme" which is just such. Scheme is interesting for more than just its math properties, though. It's also interesting because of how its math properties harmonize so nicely with various implementation techniques. In any real implementation - one that minimally is capable of some degree of hosting a meta-circular interpreter, say - we need primitive types for symbols, numbers, characters, strings, pairs, and vectors. How else can you explain tag bits to the kids? :-) -t _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
