Well Mapped « Log24

Sunday, June 1, 2025

Well Mapped

Filed under: General — Tags: Well Mapped — m759 @ 8:38 pm

And then there is point e1 . . .

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Tuesday, May 20, 2025

“A Point Chosen from a Well-Mapped Space” … Illustrated.

Filed under: General — Tags: Art Space, Exegesis, Well Mapped — m759 @ 4:26 pm

For the title quote, see a post of May 18.

In chess notation, figures from
square (or "point") a4 . . .

Geometry of the I Ching Hexagram 43, Breakthrough —

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Monday, May 19, 2025

Language “from a well-mapped space” *

Filed under: General — Tags: Petri Pictoris, Well Mapped — m759 @ 11:02 pm

See the post "Parallelisms" from the seventh day of 2025.

* Quote from the classic Peter J. Landin paper of 1966,
"The Next 700 Programming Languages"

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Sunday, May 18, 2025

Language Models History: Points in a Space, 1966

Filed under: General — Tags: Petri Pictoris, Well Mapped — m759 @ 3:31 pm

Update from 10 minutes later:

Summary of the 1966 Landin paper in a Google AI Overview —

In his 1966 paper "The Next 700 Programming Languages," Peter Landin explored the potential for a large and diverse family of programming languages, arguing for a principled approach to language design focusing on well-defined frameworks and a "well-mapped space" of possible languages. He introduced ISWIM (If You See What I Mean), an abstract language that served as a foundational concept for functional programming. [1, 2]

Here's a more detailed explanation:

Landin's Vision: Landin's work challenged the idea that programming languages should be designed individually and instead advocated for a more systematic approach. He envisioned a vast, interconnected space of languages, each tailored to specific needs and functionalities. [1, 1, 2]
ISWIM: ISWIM, described in his paper, was an abstract, functional language that aimed to provide a flexible framework for building various programming languages. It was not intended to be a concrete language, but rather a blueprint for how languages could be designed based on principles of functional programming and dataflow programming. [2, 2, 3, 4]
Influence on Functional Programming: ISWIM's concepts profoundly influenced the development of functional programming languages like SASL, Miranda, ML, Haskell, and their successors, as well as dataflow languages like Lucid, according to Wikipedia. [2, 2]
Principle-Based Design: Landin's paper highlighted the importance of principled design in programming languages, emphasizing the need for clear rules and conventions regarding user-defined names, functional relationships, and the use of abstract notation. [1, 1, 5, 5]
"Well-Mapped Space": The idea of a "well-mapped space" suggests that rather than designing languages from scratch, they can be derived from a larger framework, making the process more organized and efficient. [1, 1]
Focus on Expressions: ISWIM prioritized expressions over statements, aiming to enable a wider range of user needs to be met through concise, functional expressions. [6, 6]
Abstract Nature: Landin's ISWIM was an abstract language, meaning it didn't prescribe a specific physical form or syntax, allowing for flexibility in implementation. [2, 7, 7]

In essence, Landin's "Next 700 Programming Languages" paper was a seminal work that envisioned a future where programming languages would be designed more systematically and in a more principled manner, paving the way for the development of various functional and dataflow programming paradigms. [1, 2, 6]

AI responses may include mistakes.

[1] https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/papers/ddc-jacm.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISWIM

[3] https://cs4fn.blog/2025/02/08/peter-landin-elegance-from-logic/

[4] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-11806-7_1

[5] https://scispace.com/papers/the-next-700-programming-languages-3g7bazzhyn?citations_page=83

[6] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365230.365257

[7] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf

Two links from the homepage of the Crary of the cmu.edu link above —

A Man For All Seasons
The Gods of the Copybook Headings .

Other material related to the name Crary —

http://m759.net/wordpress/?tag=crary-art .