HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

You might like this:

https://flownet.com/ron/lambda-calculus.html

Or the movie version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qC1iZN5ozw

If you're interested in exploring the relationship of Lisp and the lambda calculus you might find this interesting:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/lc.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qC1iZN5ozw

⬐ gsg

Nice article, but the language embedded here is exactly the untyped lambda calculus, not a Lisp. You can tell because there are no tags: pair is given as \x y sel -> sel x y, which is indeed the textbook way to encode pairs but does not provide enough to write CONSP.

If you wished to implement a subset of Lisp in LC faithfully you would need an encoding for sums - which would not be all that hard, but does reflect the distance between Lisp values and the raw abstractions of the lambda calculus. (There is also the more substantial matter of RPLACD, etc, but let's just pretend that particular rabbit hole is not there.)

⬐ lisper

> does not provide enough to write CONSP

Yes, that's a very good point. That's why I said, "If you want to explore the relationship between Lisp and ULC..." and deliberately not, "If you want to see how to embed Lisp in ULC..."

Writing CONSP actually makes a very interesting exercise.

⬐ aag

OP here. Since this is a video, I'll post the abstract, etc.:

by Ron Garret

The lambda calculus is widely known but also widely misunderstood. It it considered by most coders to be nothing more than a theoretical curiosity and not really useful for anything by itself. In this talk, I show how to write a factorial function in pure lambda calculus, i.e. using nothing but lambdas, in a way that is actually efficient enough to compute the factorial of ten in a few seconds. Seeing how this is done can provide deep insights into functional programming, compilation, and other useful programming techniques like CPS-conversion.

Bay Area Lisp and Scheme Meetup, http://balisp.org/ , Sat 17 Oct 2015, Hacker Dojo, Mountain View, CA