History of John Backus's functional programming project (draft)

Posted by cwbuilds 3 days ago

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Comment by discarded1023 19 hours ago

I've always wondered if there's more to FP than (more or less) point-free style with an associated algebra. TFA seems to stop just when it might get interesting. Did Backus ever develop (or aim for) a notion of semantic completeness, e.g. Cartesian closure or whatever works [0] for Hughes's Arrows? The last has the interesting property of being foundationally point-free but also supporting a syntax with variables (with non-standard scoping rules). Which perhaps refutes Backus's original concerns.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_(computer_science)

Comment by pmcjones 2 hours ago

Author here. This is work-in-progress, not linked from top level. I'll keep working.

Comment by adrian_b 12 hours ago

TFA contains a great number of links to downloadable interesting research papers.