Re: ILC2005: McCarthy denounces Common Lisp, "Lisp", XML, and Rahul

Lars Brinkhoff <lars.spam@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>> Pascal Costanza wrote:
>>> I know that you are working on such a beast. Have you already taken
>>> a look at 3-Lisp? You definitely should...
>
> Google helped me find these articles with some information about 3-Lisp:
>
> http://crpit.com/confpapers/CRPITV37Miyoshi.pdf
> http://www2.parc.com/csl/groups/sda/projects/reflection96/docs/malenfant/ref96/ref96.html
>
> Did I miss anything?

It would also be worthwhile to look at the papers that disagree with
the 3-Lisp viewpoint:

Mitchell Wand. "The Mystery of the Tower Revealed: a Non-Reflective
Description of the Reflective Tower".
Proceedings of the 1986 ACM Symposium on LISP and Functional
Programming.
August 1986.

------

AI Memo 946
Reification without Evaluation -- Alan Bawdin

Constructing self-referential systems, such as Brian Smith's 3-lisp
language, is actually more straightforward than you think. Anyone
can build an infinite tower of processors (where each processor
implementes the processor at th next level below) by employing some
common sense and one simple trick. In particular, it is *not*
necessary to re-design quotation, take a stand on teh relative
merits of evaluation vs. normalization, or treat continuations as
meta-level objects. This paper presents a simple programming
language interpreter that illustrates how this can be done. By
keeping expression evaluation entirely separate from the mechanisms
that implement its infinite tower, this interpreter avoids many
troublesome aspects of previous self-referential programming
languages. Given these basically straightforward techniques,
processor towers might be easily constructed for a wide variety of
systems to enable them to manipulate and reason about themselves.

------

Alan Bawden is one smart cookie.


--
~jrm
.

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