Re:Lambda Calculus in 400 Bytes
by chriswarbo on Monday February 28, 2022 @03:38AM
(#30497711)
I really like de Bruijn indexes, but whenever alternatives are suggested I always like to mention the paper "I am not a number, I am a free variable", if only for the title ;)
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.36...
It works, but it's very fiddly. My favourite way of solving the problem of names in the lambda calculus is to use Pitts-Gabbay nominal syntax. Wikipedia has a weak article on them, which I mean someday to fix up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_terms_(computer_scienc...