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From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry G. Baker)
Subject: Re: [history question] Why was typed lambda calculus not used?
Message-ID: <hbakerCz0Fqp.47H@netcom.com>
Organization: nil
References: <hbakerCyww5K.F62@netcom.com> <39m2u5$b0s@nef.ens.fr> <aldersonCyz5r7.8IH@netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 9 Nov 1994 17:11:12 GMT
Lines: 43

In article <aldersonCyz5r7.8IH@netcom.com> alderson@netcom.com writes:
>In article <39m2u5$b0s@nef.ens.fr> jch@triere.ens.fr (Juliusz Chroboczek)
>>In article <hbakerCyww5K.F62@netcom.com>,
>>Henry G. Baker <hbaker@netcom.com> wrote:
>
>>>McCarthy freely admits that he didn't really understand _any_ lambda
>>>calculus when he invented the first Lisp.
>
>Reference 3 [of Recusive Functions of Symbolic Expressions] is
>	A. Church, {\it The Calculi of Lambda-Conversion} (Princeton
>	  University Press, Princeton, N. J., 1941).
>
>Earlier in the McCarthy paper, he states that the original idea for Lisp arose
>in 1958.  I don't have Stoyan's book to check, but I think LAMBDA existed even
>then.
>
>Note that JMC's statement is that he did not *understand* lambda-calculus, not
>that he was unfamiliar with any particular form thereof.  And given his back-
>ground in recursion theory, I'd be more surprised if he *were* unfamiliar with
>it than not.

According to McCarthy's 'History of Lisp', Sigplan Not. 13,8 (Aug
1978), James Slagle had an environment bug due to what we now call
dynamic scoping and Steve Russell invented the FUNARG (function
closure) to solve it.  McCarthy says "I must confess that I regarded
this difficulty as just a bug".  McCarthy then referenes Joel Moses's
paper 'The Function of FUNCTION in Lisp', MIT AI Memo 199, Proj. Mac Memo
428, June 1970.

Moses doesn't give much more history, but references an unpublished memo
"The FUNARG Problem Explained" by J. Weizenbaum, 1968, which I don't have
a copy of.

My statement re McCarthy may be hearsay from one or more of the following
sources: Moses, Weizenbaum, Levin, Greenblatt, Hewitt.

The last time I really tried to understand this history was in the context
of my Shallow Binding paper.

      Henry Baker
      Read ftp.netcom.com:/pub/hbaker/README for info on ftp-able papers.
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