Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: SPAD and Aldor again

[Martin Rubey]

Gabriel Dos Reis <address@hidden> writes:


> | I did quite a bit of work with Aldor now (within the species project
> | together with Ralf), and I'm quite convinced of the features of this
> | language. In particular, the semantics of Aldor feel very "sound" to me,
> | i.e., Aldor usually does what I expect it to do and allows what I would
> | expect it to allow.
> 
> except when it does not, then you get depressed :-)

But so far not because of Aldor, only because of Axiom's inability to handle
Aldor code.

> I'm not saying we should not having anything that is in Aldor.  I'm saying,
> we should define the goal beyond being a clone of Aldor.  Cloning Aldor is
> not that much interesting.  People who wants Aldor know where to get it.  The
> features should be cloned only when they support the goals very well and
> beyond.

That's true.

> | Gaby pointed out that "==" has different semantics in Aldor and Axiom, but I
> | have the feeling that this difference is not so severe: in fact, I don't 
> know
> 
> yes, those are "little details" that are easy to fix in principle, but
> might consume lot of resource to get right. 

Ahem, what I am saying is that if we want constants in future SPAD, we will use
the symbol "==" to introduce them. There are no constants in SPAD currently. If
we want to have types being first class, we will very likely need constants.

> From my perspective, I would like to support recursive types (get rid
> of )abbrev), dependent types, algebraic types.  

What are "algebraic types"?

Martin