On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 10:07 AM, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote: > Ralf Hemmecke writes: > ... > | You certainly know that Aldor has functions of the form > | > | string: Literal -> % > | > | that can be exported and implemented by any domain. > | Do you intend to provide something like that in OpenAxiomm, too? > > I saw the suggestion, I've yet to convince myself that it solves the > original problem it was intended to solve conveniently. Certainly > that is not the only design choice.
I am also not convinced that introducing a built-in domain called 'Literal' is such a good idea. Literal is just a means of delaying type decisions to the interpreter run-time. In fact, in Axiom I think this job should really fall on a domain like InputForm (or in the case of OpenAxiom, perhaps the new domain representing a fully typed abstract syntax tree). The operation coerce: InputForm -> % should really be the counterpart of coerce: % -> OutputForm The operation coerce(x:InputForm):% == would be normally be defined recursively over operations exported by % and would also be responsible for converting InputForm values for which 'atom?' returns true to values in the domain %. But probably InputForm as it is currently defined in Axiom is too strongly based on Lisp (SExpression) > For example, the domain Literal could have been parameterized by > the type of the fundamental domain of the literal, so that I could write > > coerce: Literal String -> % > > instead of `moving the type of the literal into the function name'. > I think what you are suggesting, Gaby is similar to what I say above. > ... There is a second part to your reply to Ralf concerning universal quantification, on which I will comment separately. Regards, Bill Page. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ open-axiom-devel mailing list open-axiom-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/open-axiom-devel
