jerzy.karczmarczuk@info.unicaen.fr wrote:
[McCarthy's] aim was to use the mathematical formalismus as languages and not as calculi. This is the root of the historical fact that he never took the Lambda-Calculus conversion rules as a sound basis for LISP implementation." So, I believe it is not so briliant an idea to confound the Church calculus with Lisp!
It's difficult to extricate the two, as Lisp & McCarthy's experience shows. The decision to use lambda notation without the accompanying semantics would have been fine if Lisp had not also had first-class functions. But with first-class functions, and without lexical scoping semantics, Lisp suffered from scoping bugs which were only resolved once Lisp's 'lambda' was changed to follow Church's semantics, as Sussman and Steele originally did for Scheme. When CL adopted lexical scoping, it was seen as a choice, but it wasn't really much of a choice. The choice was between continuing with a fundamentally buggy language and working around those bugs somehow, or fixing it by adopting Church's lexical scoping rules.
Wherever you look, you find plenty of occasions to err, it suffices to put yourself in a mode of a dead person from the movie "The sixth sense" of M. Night Shyamalan, with Bruce Willis, and Haley Joel Osment.
I see dead languages... Anton