On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Martin Berger wrote:

> > That's how it's supposed to be. Especially scheme tries to be nothing else 
> > but just the minimal "functional assembly language". So one can put other 
> > languages on top of it.
> 
> the words "functional" and "minimal" may be considered contradictory as the basic
> primitive of functional programming, beta reduction, is a very heavy operation that
> can successfully be decomposed into more lightweight operations like:
> 
>     - state change + conditional branching.
>     - continuation passing
>     - name-passing interaction.
> 
> (of those the third is the most elementary and general and encompasses the others).
> putting any of those on top of beta-reduction generally leads to something ugly.
> functional abstractions are extremely useful in many computational situations, but
> they are high-level, not something one can use successfully as a foundation to start
> from. several decades of failed attempts at founding (the semantics of) computation
> on lambda calculus shows this. the difficulties of finding convincing hoare-logics for
> ML-like languages, a problem that has really only been solved this year, and on the
> basis of pi-calculus, is another indication in this direction.

Now that sounds interesting! Can you provide me with a few references?

-- 
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