Lambda the Ultimate

We've got languages with support for iterators and lazy lists and other sequence oriented structures. Is there any language with built in support for generating functions? I don't have any immediate application in mind, I'm just curious as to what could be possible.

Edit: Woops, didn't realize that this news had already been posted! Guess I should read the front page once in a while...

Please feel free to check out the real article.



Hello Everyone,
I recently heard the following message in the Mozart/Oz newsgroup, and thought I should pass it on to all the CTM fans on this site:

From: Peter Vay Roy To: users@mozart-oz.org

Dear all,

During the week of Nov. 7, I am planning to tour American
universities that teach or are thinking of teaching with our
programming textbook.  If you are in the US and you would
like me to visit your institution, please send me email.

Peter

The website of Hutton's introductory Programming in Haskell book, now includes eleven powerpoint presentations covering most of the chapters in the book. Each set of slides is intended to be used for a one hour lecture.

Hi

I am looking for information on subtype inference.

Consider a type system with a sub rule:

E,C|- e:sigma C|-sigma :sigma'
----------------------------------------
E,C|- e:sigma'

Here E is the type environment and C is the (initially empty) subtype constraint set.
And I use : to denote the smaller than relation on types for lack of a better symbol.

And a set of rules for infering constrainst from sigma:sigma' depending on the underlying type of sigma. (it is a structural type system).

My question is, after my type inference assigns type sigma’ to e, how do I choose sigma’, as to find the correct underlying constraints.

I looked and asked around. Some suggested using a copy of sigma, I find this odd because I don’t see why, and how this would produce the needed type constraints.

I would be grateful for either a article explaining this matter or pointers to the underlying idea.

R.K.

BTW this is the article I’m working on
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/18011/http:zSzzSzresearch.microsoft.comzSz~mafzSzpopl01.pdf/rehof01typebased.pdf

Can I delete a post I made on the other forum?

I want to do this because I can't format it right.
Only about a quarter of the text shows, and it stops mid-phrase.

R.K.

Bruce Eckel, famous author of programming books Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++, writes some commentary about Arnold's article on generics (discussed here on LtU):

Ken Arnold just posted a blog entry describing how difficult he found generics when working on the upcoming edition of The Java Programming Language book.

The fact that it's taken this book so long to get published is just one indicator of the complexity of the language. I've also noticed that most other Java books have either taken a long time, or just briefly glossed over generics, and often both.

[...]

One commenter to Ken's blog points out that it's not the idea of generics that is the problem, but the implementation, to which I agree, and I also think this is what Ken actually meant.

Here Eckel seems to agree with many opinions expressed in the previous discussion: that's not a problem with generics in general, but with the Java implementation. And he argues that it would be better if the language was designed with generics in mind in the first place, which I don't think anyone would disagree with.

But the question is, how can we change the course of a moving train? It seems to be never easy. Can PL theory help the evolution of programming systems and not only their design?