schuerig / acm.org (Michael Schuerig) wrote:
>
>Peter Wood <peter.wood / worldonline.dk> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Dec 14, 2000 at 08:24:44AM +0900, Ben Tilly wrote:
> >
> > > Mathematicians don't learn Lisp.  They learn things like
> > > Lesbegue integration.
> > >
> >
> > Fortunately some of them do:
> >
> > http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~chaitin/lisp.html
> >
> > Here's a quote from one of Chaitin's papers:
> >
> > "But let me start telling you why I think LISP should be loved by
> > mathematicians. I think it's the only computer programming language
> > that is mathematically respectable, because it's the only one that I
> > can prove theorems about!"
>
>Is this even true? How about Haskell, ML & others?
>
This is true.  Chaitan is trying to prove strong relatives of
the Halting problem.  His custom version of Lisp has a version
of eval that takes a second argument for how many steps to run.
This eval that is guaranteed to return vastly simplifies his
life.

Cheers,
Ben
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