Author Archives: Bill Wadge

Recently my PhD student gave a rehearsal of their 20 minute oral presentation. It was ok. Average. In other words, (seemingly) long, and boring. Like so many people’s technical talks. What can you do? What you can do is follow … Continue reading →

Two cheers for the World Wide Web — Ted Nelson Ted Nelson invented hypertext but not the web. He thinks it hasn’t fulfilled its real potential, and I agree. One of his good ideas that the web doesn’t really support … Continue reading →

As I’ve said before, PyFL is functional programming for the rest of us. (It’s available at pyflang.com.) PyFL now has type checking – without type declarations. Instead the type is produced by evaluating the program over the domain of types.

Readers of this blog are familiar with notions of computability – basically, the question is, what can machines do without human assistance? And you are familiar with machines. Electronic ones of course, but I always like to think of machines … Continue reading →

When Lucid first came out decades ago it was a very primitive language. It had only program variables and built-in operators and functions, like next or fby. Users could not define their own functions (or “subroutines” as they were often … Continue reading →

It was developed in a secret lab and released, after which it spread rapidly. COVID? (maybe …). But I’m talking about the new PyFL interpreter. It’s finally available for the general public at pyflang.com To make things simple, in the form … Continue reading →

I wrote a program to play unbeatable tictactoe in my experimental functional language PYFL. (PYFL = Python based functional language; henceforth PyFL) Of course writing a tictactoe player is hardly a major challenge, but I wanted to see how it … Continue reading →

A very long time ago I had an interesting if flawed idea. The idea was to (optionally) replace instances of expression constructs with equations defining or referring to components of conventional compound structures. The special variables defined or used I … Continue reading →

As I’ve explained I invented and implemented a small functional language (PYFL) to test out some ideas. In particular one idea is the (oxymoronic) functional while loop. A while loop? In a functional language? “Impossible!” you snort. Well you’re wrong. … Continue reading →

As I’ve already explained I’ve invented and implemented an experimental functional language – PyFL (Python based Functional Language) – to try out some ideas. For example, PyFL has a full set of Variable Binding Operators (VBOs) that use a linear … Continue reading →