You say the Y combinator, as presented, could be done in Haskell, but it's got an infinite type, so it's a bit trickier to get working.
Programming With Nothing: FizzBuzz in the lambda calculus in Ruby
51–55 of 55 posts
Re: Programming With Nothing: FizzBuzz in the lambda calculus in Ruby
#52!
Now functional programming and lambda calculus makes sense.
This is un-cking-real.
Thank you.
Re: Programming With Nothing: FizzBuzz in the lambda calculus in Ruby
#53Holy cow. This could have replaced ~8 weeks of my CS languages/compilers class, and I would have understood the material better at the end of it.
I don't know. I see it as a kind of entertaining academic game - a Glass Bead Game, if you will, and I intend the deep allusion - but I wouldn't put too much faith in it teaching you much about the mechanics of compilers. It's one way of decomposing semantics into more simple elements, but it's not the one chosen for almost all practical languages, which after all have to execute on silicon, not in the Lambda calculu…
Well, I suspect it would have helped me in my class, since we're using a functional language to implement a compiler. Our final exam from earlier today included a section regarding the lambda calculus. In fact, as I mulled over which incorrect answer to provide, I wished I could have talked previously with tomstuart about the subject.
Re: Programming With Nothing: FizzBuzz in the lambda calculus in Ruby
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I'd necessarily agree with your assessment of parsing as a field in 2011. There are still a lot of unsolved problems going forward --- see Laurence Tratt's excellent article on the subject for a few details: http://tratt.net/laurie/tech_articles/articles/parsing_the_s...
I don't know. Barrkel's example seems better to me because there's an obvious practical need for it. The trouble with most of the work on parsing I see is that it's just not hard to hand-write a parser. I used to avoid doing so, and then I wrote one and was surprised: once you factor in error-handling and whatever other meaningful output your system may need from its parser (e.g. text extents for ASTs), the overall c…
I fully agree with you that i favor hand-written recursive-descent parsing. However, it still helps to know the theory for error recovering etc.
Re: Programming With Nothing: FizzBuzz in the lambda calculus in Ruby
#55The title of this article, "Programming With Nothing", piques my interest. I don't have a strong CS background, so this might be a silly question... But obviously, on a computer, "code" is really data, a series of bytes that instructs the processor what to do. In a literal sense, this sort of lamba calculus implementation isn't far removed from bog standard procedural programming. What's the actual philosophical back…
What is a function?
Mathematically a function is a mapping from an input domain to an output domain. In the Lambda calculus a function is essentially a tuple of a variable name and a body lambda expression. Applying the function to an argument lambda expression gives you the body expression, where all ocurrences of the variable name are replaced with the argument expression. Essentially, the function can be understood as an replacement rule.
I do not understand what you mean with "special".