Re: functional programming is great, but why lists?

[Bill Richter <richter@math.northwestern.edu>]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2001, Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote:

> Olin is wrong, Bill.  He writes well to obscure the weakness of his
> thoughts.  We don't need lists at all.
>
> Matthias and I look forward to your 10,000 line Scheme program that
> uses LAMBDA instead of lists.

You write really well, Shriram, so it's always a pleasure to read your
prose, even when you're kicking my butt :)

Surely there must be a simple answer to my question.  In Church's LC, cons
was just a lambda that takes 2 arguments T & F (as I fruitlessly tried to
explain to Tom Lord on c.l.s.).  And the standard numbering system at the
time used lists (therefore a crazy lambda), but Church's numbers weren't
lists, as Noel just pointed out.

-- 
Bill
<http://www.math.nwu.edu/~richter>