Re: Minimal keywords needed for constructing a full CL system

Don Geddis wrote:
"Javier" <javuchi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote on 4 Jul 2006 09:53:
I'm actually not asking for "whose minimal set is better", but instead
"whose minimal set is NECESARY".

So, why isn't just LAMBDA, as has been suggested to you, the answer to your
question?

It is not really the minimum set since it does no I/O, as I mentioned
earlier.
So unless your prepared to speculate about implementing the whole
universe using lambda then you need a least one input and one output
operation.

Also I don't think you can really "build up" from Lambda. You could
implement a lisp compiler entirely with it and one input and output
operation. But you couldn't build an implementation that was built on
only lambda, you need some form of quoting and expansion of
expressions, as far as I can see.

The goal here is not for real world, in wich performance and
optimization is a must. I'm just talking in a theorical situation.

So, you don't care about performance.

Then you only need LAMBDA. Are you now satisfied with the answer?

If not, why not? Perhaps you have concerns that go beyond just the
THEORETICAL NECESSARY MINIMAL SET that you're claiming.

I don't think the OP really want that (even though that's what he
said). I think what the OP is looking for is the smallest set that
meets some very limited criteria of practicality. That was the sense I
answered the question in anyway.

Javier, is that correct?


It is interesting when learning lisp to understand what can be done in
the lisp layer. I remember when I learnt Emacs being impressed by the
number of things that seemed quite fundamental that were done in Lisp,
such as backticks. I found later that, Emacs isn't actually a great
example. I remember thinking later just how few operations would
actually be necessary in order to build up the rest. Whether there is
any real use in finding this "minimum set" is another matter. I can
certainly see uses for implementors in finding a practical
just-less-than minimum set they can use to build from.

.

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