On 27 September 2012 14:51, Chris Wong
Hello all
Some of you in the audience may have read Dave Keenan's paper, [To Dissect a Mockingbird][]. A subset of that may have wondered if it was possible to generate those pretty pictures programmatically. For that subset, I can answer to you -- yes, yes you can.
[To Dissect a Mockingbird]: http://dkeenan.com/Lambda/
Sylvia is a lambda calculus visualizer. It takes in an expression in the untyped lambda calculus and spits out a pretty picture.
Nice, it builds and runs fine for me. Perhaps you could include a few more example commandlines to get started? Running without arguments (as the README.mkd suggests) just prints the help text.
This is still in very early alpha, but it renders a fair number of combinators correctly. I plan to add animated reduction (once I figure out how to do it), and eventually develop this into a sandbox game of some sort. I'm hoping to get some comments and ideas on how I can take it from here.
I'd love to see a game which incrementally teaches reduction and expansion steps in the way that DragonBox [http://dragonboxapp.com/] teaches algebra. That would be a learning mode like Angry Birds, where new combinator birds are introduced every few levels and a small selection of useful birds are provided to help solve each level. (Lambda calculus really should be a kids' game, grown-ups always make it seem more complex than it is). Conrad.