Lambda the Ultimate

Over the last 4 years I've compiled ideas about a programming language and have written a more or less extensive specification of the syntax. I was hoping some people here could review it for me. Link:

http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~frencheneesz/Lima/Frame_Lima_main.htm

I welcome any criticism, potential issues, or any other kind of discussion in general.

On a separate note, if anyone wants to help me develop the language, I would love the help.

Hi, in short I suggest adding generic link-tags to the html for better generic navigation. That is, at least rel="prev" and "next" (I'd add "top", "first" and "last" even if they are not(?) w3c recommended).

I already wrote a mail, but may not have made myself very clear, so to elaborate on that:

The benefit of adding this information comes when using some kind of plugin or support from browsers (Links has some, Firefox with plugin) so that "forward one thread" and so on works with just one keystroke instead of mouse navigation. Since the information is already there, adding it would be rather easy or so I think.

Now, maybe someone likes this enhancement as well. And since this is my first post here, hello :)

Here's a little light reading for your day-after-Labor-Day (or whatever yesterday was where you live): Unchecked Exceptions can be Strictly More Powerful than Call/CC, Mark Lillibridge and Olivier Danvy, 1999, Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation.

We demonstrate that in the context of statically-typed purely-functional lambda calculi without recursion, unchecked exceptions (e.g., SML exceptions) can be strictly more powerful than call/cc. More precisely, we prove that a natural extension of the simply-typed lambda calculus with unchecked exceptions is strictly more powerful than all known sound extensions of Girard’s Fω (a superset of the simply-typed lambda calculus) with call/cc. This result is established by showing that the first language is Turing complete while the later languages permit only a subset of the recursive functions to be written.

I have to say that on seeing the title I was surprised: I cut my functional teeth on Scheme and every baby Schemer sucks up the knowledge that call/cc lets you create all manner of flow control including exceptions. But, as the paper makes clear, that's not necessarily the case in a statically-typed context.

Edit: Citeseerx was not responding very well, here's an alternative URL for the paper.