Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!weretis.net!feeder4.news.weretis.net!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!mx04.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Aatu Koskensilta Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional,comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme,comp.programming,comp.emacs Subject: Re: Associativity paradox in functional expressions Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2012 07:42:33 +0200 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 38 Message-ID: <87zk2sabw6.fsf@uta.fi> References: <8120f97b-15c2-4ce8-827a-158e955fb73f@z2g2000yqj.googlegroups.com> <9972e570-2504-4401-8de8-49eb1929fdfd@c17g2000yqe.googlegroups.com> <87pq3wqftc.fsf@voyager.informatimago.com> <3dd68e98-9889-4287-a352-3c7c25a3284e@d17g2000vbv.googlegroups.com> <87liejml8j.fsf@informatimago.com> <87ip9j8ctc.fsf@informatimago.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Info: mx04.eternal-september.org; posting-host="9a40d92bc750d569d32ba1ae5e1bb3c5"; logging-data="14751"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/gm+//JO/SEbgSZySm/zAh" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:uEdpnrU9Q+8NSq32ArSvLh3Uj7Y= sha1:neiRaYJAzgwUAJ3xRHScghyFrNc= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.functional:453 comp.lang.lisp:12011 comp.lang.scheme:1151 comp.programming:2478 comp.emacs:1627 Barb Knox writes: > In article <87ip9j8ctc.fsf@informatimago.com>, > "Pascal J. Bourguignon" wrote: > >> Yes. John McCarthy didn't understand lambda calculus at the time. He >> just used the lambda notation for his functions > > Yeah right. McCarthy had a PhD in mathematics and specialised in > mathematical logic; of course he knew lambda calculus. Or do you > believe his use of "lambda" was just a coincidence? Naturally McCarthy got the lambda notation from lambda calculus. McCarthy was not a mathematical logician by any stretch of the imagination -- his research was mainly in computer science, artificial intelligence in particular, and his PhD dissertation was on a problem in partial differantial equations -- and had this to say about the state of his understanding of the lambda calculus at the time: To use functions as arguments, one needs a notation for functions, and it seemed natural to use the lambda-notation of Church (1941). I didn't understand the rest of the book, so I wasn't tempted to implement his more general mechanism for defining functions. This excerpt is from McCarthy's /History of Lisp/, available on-line at: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp.ps > Are you a moron? Is that why you have such a self-aggrandising > nickname? You think "Pascal J. Bourguignon" a "self-aggrandising nickname"? -- Aatu Koskensilta (aatu.koskensilta@uta.fi) "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen" - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus