On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 03:11:31PM -0800, Tracy R Reed wrote: > >Err, I think Lisp was developed as an alternative to the Turing Machine > >notion > >of computation. So it wasn't completely divorced from programming even > >back > >then. > > I believe you are thinking of Lambda Calculus. Not Lisp specifically. > Turing Machine and Lambda Calculus were both methods of defining > computation. Then Church-Turing equivalence was proven showing that they > are essentially the same thing and equally capable. Now we can think of > computation either way with modern processors. Mostly it has been done > using the Turing machine model but I think we are seeing a resurgence in > Lambda Calculus with the parallelism coming at us.
I'm aware of Lambda Calculus but surprisingly, unless I'm mistaken, McCarthy developed Lisp as yet another choice amongst the growing number of Turing equivalent models..including Lambda Calculus. Chris -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
