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The PLT Scheme weblog

The PLT Scheme folks now have a project blog.

By neelk at 2007-05-09 01:41 | General | other blogs | 7268 reads

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Good to know. Thanks.

Good to know. Thanks.

By Ehud Lamm at Wed, 2007-05-09 12:21 | login or register to post comments

Small is Beautiful, Large is Useful, and Scheme is Both

Felleisen has struck again, with a post on the trade-off between language size and expressiveness.

Two points:

  1. You folks should really subscribe to this feed if you haven't; and

  2. He says of the single-combinator combinatory algebra (call it X), Imagine that: a complete language report in two lines; a compiler that fits in a few K instead of Ms; no more arguments about smallness.
    I wonder... I have a sort of prejudice about combinatory algebra, that this sort of term rewriting system "doesn't count" as a programming language; the smallest sort of calculus that would count, I guess, is PCF, which is definitely a toy language, but it is really a programming language, with both bigstep (operational) and smallstep (computational) semantics.
By Charles Stewart at Fri, 2007-06-15 10:56 | login or register to post comments