Squid language (was: Looking for tools for support oftheoretical informatics research)

Brent Vukmer bvukmer at blackboard.com
Fri Jul 11 21:43:28 UTC 2003


> > Just FYI:
> > 
> >>Right now I'm designing the language and am leaning towards
> >>lambda-based objects a la E (erights.org).  That is, every object
> >>is a block.
> > 
> > 
> > This was what inspired me to do the "objects as methods" 
> stuff - just 
> > being able to experiment with these notions is incredibly powerful.
> 
> Well this power goes back to John McCarthys 1958 paper
> entitled "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their 
> Computation by Machine, Part I" in  the Communications the ACM.

Heh.  I was reminded of Lisp, too.  I was also reminded of this classic:
http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/VisualWorks/How+to+get+rid+of+Objects+in+Smallta
lk

> 
> And it reminds me of the quotation that every reasonaly 
> complex system includes a more or less well written Lisp 
> interpreter in the end.

"Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C
or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden
slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

- Phil Greenspun



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