Re: Paul Graham's PyCon Keynote

[address@hidden]

Kimberley Burchett <kimbly@cybercom.net> wrote:
 >I've been playing with the idea of a language where even the difference
 >between data structures and functions is erased.
 >
 >You can think of an n-ary function as a simple n-ary array of values.  If
 >you allow assigning to the result of a function (meaning that the function
 >should return the assigned value the next time it's called), then
 >functions can take the place of data structures, and vice versa.

 >Here, get(int) and size() are basically N-array arrays -- they have no
 >side-effects, and their value is simply determined by whatever value was
 >assigned to them last.  I usually assume a semantics where functions are
 >initially undefined everywhere, and attempting to read an undefined value
 >results in an error (so get(0) would assert if you hadn't called append
 >yet).

I've been reading Leslie Lamport's _Specifying Systems: The TLA+
Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers_, and I think
that is the approach he takes for TLA+.  It's not a programming
language, but the idea is not as weird as it first seems.  (Well, ok,
maybe it is.)

Tommy McGuire