From: Caleb Clausen <vikkous@...>
Date: 2009-11-17T14:01:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Trajectories

On 11/16/09, Marnen Laibow-Koser <marnen@marnen.org> wrote:
> Caleb Clausen wrote:
>> of course, this would take an infinite amount of time to execute, and
>> require an infinite amount of memory to store the result, but in a
>> lazy functional language like haskell, that would not be true. also,
>> in a functional language, I _believe_ you can manipulate programs like
>> the one above as if they were numbers.
>
> To some extent, you can do that in Ruby.  Proc and Method are
> first-class objects.

Yeah, but you can't manipulate their results when they return one if
they ever do as if they were numbers.

>> how often is that capability
>> really needed?
>
> Which capability?  Functional programming?  It can be useful.

The capability to represent transcendental numbers exactly. I mean,
how much precision do you really need?