CS Cabal

Toronto-based reading group that meets weekly to read computer science books and papers.

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Cardelli and wegner

March 16, 2015

By Scott

Hey Everyone, Thanks for the interesting discussion of section 2 of Cardelli & Wegner’s paper, “On Understanding Types, Data Abstraction, and Polymorphism.”

Next week we will continue on to sections 3, 4, and 5 of Cardelli & Wegner, meeting 6:30 pm Friday at Bento Miso.

Section 2 of Cardelli & Wegner introduces their augmented typed lambda calculus, ‘Fun’, so named as in their words, “We christen this language Fun because fun instead of Lambda is the functional abstraction keyword and because it is a pleasure to deal with.” On first reading it seems a straightforward exposition of their language, however during the course of the evening we found numerous subtleties hidden just beneath the surface. Thanks to Dann and other’s probing questions and Ben’s knowledge of the subject matter, I think we all gained a deeper understanding of ‘Fun’, then we would have by just reading it on our own. What surprise! I always thought quiet solitary study would be the surest path to Fun.

See you all next week! Scott?