It's Actors All The Way Down

One important difference between Kernel and traditional LISP/Scheme is Kernel’s pervasive use of encapsulated types [1]. There is a clear distinction in Kernel between decomposable structures and opaque objects. Encapsulated types are a significant contributor toward smooth extensibility. They allow the definition of objects, and operations on those object, that are indistinguishable from primitives. We […]

John Shutt has reformulated the foundations of LISP/Scheme [1]. Observing that Lambda is a primitive applicative constructor, he proposes Vau as a primitve operative constructor instead. This changes our focus from implicit evaluation to explicit evaluation. Applicatives evaluate their operands before evaluating the combination. Operatives act directly on their (unevaluated) operands, possibly evaluating them selectively. […]

This article is dedicated to the memory of John McCarthy (1927–2011) We are constantly on a quest for the elegant combination of simplicity and expressiveness in computer languages—what Alan Kay calls the “Maxwell’s Equations of Software“. An important early milestone was John McCarthy’s LISP [1] (The evolution of these ideas and the thinking behind them […]