

Quirky Birds and Meta-Syntactic Programming - raganwald
http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/tree/master/2008-11-04

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mechanical_fish
_As explained in Kestrels, the practice of nicknaming combinators after birds
was established in Raymond Smullyan's amazing book To Mock a Mockingbird. In
this book, Smullyan explains combinatory logic and derives a number of
important results by presenting the various combinators as songbirds in a
forest. Since the publication of the book more than twenty years ago, the
names he gave the birds have become standard nicknames for the various
combinators._

Holy crap. I own two of Smullyan's books, which I read as a kid, but I never
knew this. News.yc pays off again!

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raganwald
My bad, the link really should be:

[http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/tree/master/2008-11-0...](http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/tree/master/2008-11-04/quirky_birds_and_meta_syntactic_programming.markdown)

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tel
Reg, as usual, is making Ruby do some pretty exotic gymnastics, but more than
the language extensions themselves, I just really want to read To Mock a
Mockingbird now.

