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Alternative List Implementation #10

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HalosGhost opened this issue Mar 17, 2019 · 0 comments

HalosGhost commented Mar 17, 2019

It looks like an accepted alternative (to nested church pairs) implementation of lists in the lambda calculus is representing them as a right-fold.

There are a few benefits to this style:

it mirrors the style of natural numbers and booleans (etc.) in that the type's encoding is the (or, at least, a) valid eliminator
fold functions become superfluous (rather, you just need to eval the list with the proper arguments)

The obvious negative is that it would require updating the term-printer to support this encoding rather than the current version.

Is this too much work for not enough gain?

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