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Re: what most every language is missing :-)
At 3:22 PM -0500 3/28/03, Guy Steele - Sun Microsystems Labs wrote:
> Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 10:36:56 -0600
> From: Trevis Rothwell <tjr@acm.org>
> To: Noel Welsh <noelwelsh@yahoo.com>, ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu
> Subject: Re: what most every language is missing :-)
>
>
> Maybe if instead of giving a definite "true", it would work like
> this:
>
> schrodinger's-cat =? dead -> "hmmm... could be..."
>
> and
>
> schrodinger's-cat =? alive -> "hmmm... could be..."
>
> Either way, is there a semantic difference between saying "the cat
> might be alive" and "the cat might not be alive"? Certainly the
> first one sounds more positive and the second one more negative,
> but is there an actual difference?
>
>There can be. Suppose you are doing evaluation with
>a possible-world semantics, so that the value of
>an expression is actually the *set* of possible
>values that the expression might take on under a
>"normal" semantics.
With more interesting systems it can also be used as a spot to split
the execution stream and assign weights to the new streams, deferring
final evaluation of the results until you've enough information, or
have reached a stopping point and have to generate some random
numbers, to collapse the system to a final result.
The only problem with that approach, though, is that taken to its
logical conclusion you get Quantum INTERCAL, and I'm not sure anyone
really wants that.
--
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
dan@sidhe.org have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk