Sure, but the otherwise excellent OP isn't about that. It's about building highe... | Hacker News

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davidmathers on Jan 17, 2011 | parent | context | favorite | on: Compiling to lambda-calculus: Turtles all the way ...

Sure, but the otherwise excellent OP isn't about that. It's about building higher level concepts out of the lambda calculus. Nothing to do with Turing machines.

Turing machines and lambda calculus are both foundational languages on top of which those higher level concepts can be constructed.

How to translate back and forth from Turing machine to lambda calculus is something I really want to understand actually. I've been meaning to sit down and figure it out but haven't done it yet.

mattmight on Jan 17, 2011 | [–]

Thanks for your feedback.

I tweaked the abstract a bit to reflect your point.

I'll do a follow-on post on how to explicitly reduce the lambda calculus to Turing machines and vice versa.

Most of the hard work is done with this post.

TheSOB88 on Jan 17, 2011 | [–]

Some things just don't have an algorithm. You have to figure out each case by itself.

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