Re: Vectors as functions

[Robby Findler <address@hidden>]

Oh no, I abhor sarcasm. 

I would rather write all of my programs in the pure lambda calculus --
failing that I want to make sure my programming language's only
operation syntactic construct is function application. PDE's like
DrScheme and software contracts are for the weak, stupid masses of
programmers; not for us elite.

Robby

At Thu, 14 Aug 2003 18:38:22 -0400, Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote:
> People, people -- they're being *sarcastic*.
> 
> (At least, I hope to heaven you are, Prof. Findler.)
> 
> Shriram
> 
> Pascal Costanza wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On Donnerstag, August 14, 2003, at 07:01  Uhr, Robby Findler wrote:
> > 
> > > As far as vectors as functions, it means that the vector selection
> > > operation becomes applying a vector (as a function) to a number.
> > > Mutation would be applying it to two values, a number as index and new
> > > value to store at that index.
> > 
> > While this might be aesthetic from a mathematical point of view, I 
> > think this most probably leads to harder to find bugs. Think about 
> > (apply vec arglist) - this would have strongly different semantics 
> > depending on the size of arglist. I'd prefer this to throw an exception 
> > for the wrong number of arguments instead of letting this go through 
> > unnoticed.
> > 
> > In general, I think one shouldn't unify things that are strongly 
> > different.
> > 
> > 
> > Pascal
> > 
>