[CL] "Lambdas changed my life," Barbara Partee

[John F. Sowa]

Drew and Pat,

I am strongly in favor of syntactic extensions
that simplify the programming effort, especially
the housekeeping details, without changing the
underlying semantics.

Restricted quantifiers are an example, and if we
can do the same sort of thing for lambdas, I would
love to see that as an option.

The Lisp experience is what convinced me:  Lambdas
don't give you any power beyond a Turing machine, but
they simplify many kinds of programming techniques.
The same kinds of simplifications are possible when
you represent things declaratively in logic instead
of procedurally in Lisp.

Any particular application, such as Z, NLP, etc., could
be dismissed as "outside the scope of our project", but
the fact that similar examples keep coming up in so many
different areas indicates that there is something
fundamental to the mechanism.

John