On 10/31/10 7:10 PM, Derek Elkins wrote:
Well, you can get "A Novel Representation of Lists and Its Application to the Function 'Reverse'" by John Hughes online published in 1986 which is referenced by Wadler's 1987 "The Concatenate Vanishes" and references Richard Bird's 1984 paper "Transformational programming and the paragraph problem" though I'd be quite surprised if that was the first place the representation appeared in print.
Barring the "worse than useless" appellation, the technique has been around in logic programming (and classic Lisp, IIRC) for a few decades longer. I've always heard it referred to as part of the folklore of logic/functional programming though, so I'm not sure of any earlier print references off-hand.
(Though I find it curious that you think the logic version is so different...)
-- Live well, ~wren _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
