Bill Page <bill.p...@newsynthesis.org> writes: | [Comment moved to this thread.] | | On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 12:59 PM, Gabriel Dos Reis <g...@cs.tamu.edu> wrote: | > Ralf Hemmecke <r...@hemmecke.de> writes: | > | > | On 01/19/2012 06:17 PM, Bill Page wrote: | > | > Ok, so Aldor builds these into the language too. Why not Rep? | > | | > | Because that is just a convention and not necessary as a language | > | construct. (cf. the thread from 2007 that I mentioned earlier). | > | > if the argument hinges on 'convention', then I am a bit disturbed: are | > you claiming that the builtin types Record, Union, Mapping, Category, | > etc., are all free of conventions? | > | | I think there are very good reasons to consider at least Record, Union | and Mapping as constructs that are essentially free of conventions - | at least from the point of view of the intended application: | expressing mathematical algorithms.
>From mathematics and semantics point of view, Record, Mapping, Unions are just _conventional_ uses of dependent sigma-types and product-types. They are no less conventional than saying that the language has a distinguished name 'Rep' that can bound in a domain capsule. It isn't logically tenable to pretend the contrary. | We want a language that supports | some concept of mathematical category or at least universal algebra. | Thing is these constructs collectively make the language cartesian | closed in the sense of category theory. This notion is essentially | universal, in fact it is universal in a technical sense... typed | lambda calculus etc. This means that we can do many things (almost up | to set theory) as a "first order" language. No argument here. -- Gaby ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d _______________________________________________ open-axiom-devel mailing list open-axiom-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/open-axiom-devel
