Some of you might be interested to learn that argmungers are now explicitly included in my thesis: the mathematical concept, that is, not the code. One can recast classical universal algebra (which works syntactically, with words in a recursive language and denumerable sets of variables) in terms of planar trees of operators (abstract syntax trees ( Read more... )

A comparison of the Haskell argmunger with its Arc equivalent (or even its Perl equivalent) should make something clear. It's been claimed that Haskell doesn't need macros, because most of the things that Lispers need macros for can be done in Haskell using lazy evaluation and so on. But the argmunger example makes it clear that there are things ( Read more... )

By the way, here's what an argmunger looks like in Arc:
(def argmunge (munger victim) (fn args (apply victim (map args munger)))) It's used like so:
arc> ((argmunge '(1 0) cons) 'x 'y)
(y . x)
arc> ((argmunge '(2 3 1 1 0 3 2) list) 'a 'b 'c 'd 'e 'f 'g)
(c d b b a d c)That took a couple of minutes to write, and worked first time. Sw33t! Though I ( Read more... )

[The hope was that this post would come in three somewhat independent sections: one pure programming, in which we develop a small utility in Template Haskell; one largely mathematics, at the upper-level high school to beginning undergraduate level, wherein we describe another approach to constructing our utility; and one purely mathematical, more ( Read more... )