From: Gustavo Gomez (ggem70@hotmail.com)
Subject: Re: [OT] Finns and education 
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Date: 2004-09-05 00:00:30 PST 


It is evident that Dr. Bill Richter talks about a lot of things he doesn't
know about.  There is evidence that he doesn't know what a grammar is, much
less a context-free grammar.  Dr. Bill Richter doesn't know what BNF is.
Dr. Bill Richter doesn't know what compositionality is.  Dr. Bill Richter
doesn't know what computable is (he has a much better idea now than say 2
weeks ago, but we still can see that he still doesn't understand it fully.)
After his response to Kevin, I'm inclined to think (but I'm not sure) he
doesn't really understand what "structural induction" is.  And so on.  But
after this, I'm beginning to think Dr. Bill Richter doesn't even understand
English!  See below.

Here is Dr. Bill Richter:

> C-F's already made my kinda def; they defined compositionality as a
> property of functions:

And Matthias Blume:

> I lost track of what "C-F" means.  But whoever it is
> (Cartwright/Felleisen, presumably?), I bet they didn't.

And Dr. Bill Richter again:

> They did!  From Cartwright/Felleisen's "Extensible Denotional", p 6:
> 
> [The map from syntactic domains to semantic domains] satisfies the law
> of compositionality: the interpretation of a phrase is a function of
> the interpretation of the sub-phrases.

Since Dr. Bill Richter has quoted this lots of times, I got curious an went
to read the original document to see what was behind the "[the map from
syntactic domains to semantic domains]"

Here is the complete paragraph:

The denotational specification of a programming language consists of two
parts.  The first part defines [... Not important here ...].  The second
part is a functional interpreter that maps elements of the syntactic domains
to elements in semantic domains.  It [here <it> obviously refers to the
functional interpreter] is defined in a universal programming language like
LAMBDA or KL and satisfies [here, again, we are talking about the functional
interpreter, not the map] the law of compositionality: [ ... I think we
already know the rest ...]

-ggem.