[om] A Proposal for extending OpenMath with structure sharing

[Richard Fateman]

Bruce Miller wrote:

<snip>

Yes, I think you got it.


> Are you suggesting that OM should restrict itself to
> objects with referential transparency? 

That would be one objective.

> Or that if we
> dont, we end up with all the complications of procedural
> programming languages?


yes.  Every utterance in OM would potentially depend on
everything that went before it. There are
encodings with history, like old teletype codes with
"numeric" and "alphabetic" shifts. But that is
a very limited kind of history.


> 
>> It might be possible to find other solutions, even better
>> solutions.  But I suggest that any recommendations first
>> address (a) How could this be solved by lambda binding?
>> (b) If it cannot be solved by (a), then another better solution
>> can be proposed.
> 
> 
> If I've understood enough of what is going on here, it seems that
> one big issue is how to allow syntactic sharing without inadvertently
> implying semantic sharing.
> 

My suggestion is to allow syntactic sharing for transmission, but
not to make it the way to imply semantic sharing.  Semantic
sharing must be done by lambda binding.

RJF


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