Lambda the Ultimate

Slow day, so from yet another odd corner of cyberspace: the Cyc system which, well, ahum, from the site:

The Cyc Knowledge Server is a very large, multi-contextual knowledge base and inference engine developed by Cycorp. Cycorp's goal is to break the "software brittleness bottleneck" once and for all by constructing a foundation of basic "common sense" knowledge--a semantic substratum of terms, rules, and relations--that will enable a variety of knowledge-intensive products and services. Cyc is intended to provide a "deep" layer of understanding that can be used by other programs to make them more flexible.

The system also comes with a language named

CycL which is "essentially an augmentation of first-order predicate calculus (FOPC), with extensions to handle equality, default reasoning, skolemization, and some second-order features."

No idea really what to think about it, CycL seems to have Lisp roots, predecessor of the semantic web or Peircian semeiotics based Wikipedia?

This article might be of interest.

From a language design perspective, this was interesting (emphasis mine):

Most noticeably for anyone reading code in the new syntax, the common double-underscore keywords prevalent in Managed Extensions for defining garbage-collected classes, properties, and so on, are a thing of the past. While a few of these keywords remain and a few more are being introduced, they are infrequently used and won't muddy up the readability of the code. These double-underscore keywords are being replaced with two new types of keywords: context-sensitive and spaced. Context-sensitive keywords are only keywords when used in certain contexts, and spaced keywords are only keywords when used in combination with other keywords. For example, the __property keyword from Managed Extensions is replaced with the property keyword. (Not only that, but the entire syntax for defining a property and its accessors has been dramatically refined, making the declaration look very similar to what you might write in C#. See Figure 1 for an example.) This doesn't prevent you from using "property" as the name of a variable in your code. A token parsed as "property" is only treated as a keyword when in the context of declaring a property on a type.

Curious if many other languages do that with keywords, and if it ends up being a cure worse than the disease...

Are there any resources online for someone looking to learn about logic..specifically as it relates to recent papers in PLT involving proof carrying code, typed assembly language, etc.? What are good printed books? (should be basic introduction). I couldn't find anything other than Jean H. Gallier's 'Logic for Computer Science.' at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~jean/gbooks/logic.html

Thanks.

This website claim: "Qi has the most powerful type theory of any language that will ever be invented."

Frankly I don't understand the first thing in this write-up but I'm sure others will find it interesting.

Also, I read somewhere that while Lisp reflects programming language theory of old, Haskell represents PLT thinking of the 90s (poorly paraphrased from memory). I've always assumed Haskell's type system and pattern matching are what's supposed to be '90s thinking,' so where does that put Qi?

Hi,

my name is Norman, im currently doing a research on cobol,

the topic is "Is COBOL dead or is it still useful?"

im totally new and dont know anything about cobol, currently, the only thing I know is that it is a programming language for bussiness.

Can someone tell me what is the problem with COBOL? why does some people thinks its dead and if its still useful in what area?

or if some of you can find me some useful links please let me know..

thanks very much,

Hongwei Xi, creator of DML and Xanadu, the ad hoc dependently typed programming languages, is developing ATS. It has several imporvemens over previous work, including object orientation and safe pointer arithmetic.

Epigram, a dependently typed PL, has a blog cleverly titled Epilogue.

Since I know there are many CT enthusiasts here at LtU, I thought I would share news of the passing of Saunders Mac Lane, one of the giants of the field, and of modern mathematics in general.

Here is an obituary.

Although I really just lurk I have to say I really like what this site is doing - providing a modern web community that focuses on certain areas of academic research and unites to some degree various academics, professionals, interested students and hobbyists. Provides interesting papers, references, news and discussion.

Perhaps this is just a symptom of the fact that computer scientists are likely to be a lot more clued up about the web and its uses than your average academic - although hopefully this will change and these sorts of things will become widespread.

What I'm asking is - does anyone know of any other sites doing something similar for other academic areas? I'd be particularly interested in any mathematics-related sites with a similar ethos, although any areas really!