[plt-scheme] Smallest set of operators

Paulo explicitly said "implement" when asked, not the below (but those
pointers were also provided to him, in Matthias's original reply).

Robby

On 2/2/07, Carl Eastlund <cce at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> On 2/2/07, Paulo J. Matos <pocm at soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> > I'm really sorry but I really can't grasp what's so hard to understand
> > in my question. I keep saying that the set of primitive values (let's
> > call it this instead of operators) needs to belong to scheme. So, no
> > C, no lambda calculus, no whatever complicated name, logic or
> > calculus... Scheme!!! You get a set of scheme primitives to implement
> > the rest of the language. Which ones do you pick for a minimal set???
> > Is this too vague?
>
> Well it seems clear to me what you mean.  You want to start with a
> minimal subset of Scheme such that you can introduce the rest of the
> standard Scheme bindings just by programming in that subset.  So C
> isn't good enough because it's not a subset of Scheme, the lambda
> calculus isn't good enough because it can simulate, but not provide,
> the Scheme primitives, and so forth.
>
> In general, you'll need the most primitive constructors, accessors,
> and mutators for primitive types, the most expressive constructs for
> control flow (conditionals, continuations, etc.) and data flow
> (multiple values, etc.), and of course the macro system.  Some
> features might be expressible as others, but fundamental types that
> are guaranteed to be distinct must be provided natively, and
> fundamental language operations can't be simulated.
>
> I don't know that my answer is terribly illuminating - these
> guidelines seem pretty obvious to me - and I'm not going to take the
> time to actually go through the list and pick a "basis" for the
> bindings.  But this is the general process I'd go through if I did.
>
> --
> Carl Eastlund
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