Talk:McCarthy Formalism

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[edit] Request for expert

I remember hearing about this "formalism" in the mid-1970's but not much thereafter. It is as if it vanished. By use of the Dartmouth library I was able to find and copy for study one of McCarthy's papers but unable to find any other books, references or anything else with respect to his "Formalism" -- except a subchapter in Minsky's (1967) book; Minsky thought highly of his work. But there is something very odd in Minsky's analysis -- he doesn't add the identity function to his set of basic recursive operators (it is almost as if he made a mistake, or he missed something). And McCarthy's formalism seems to be just another selection of basic recursion operators that happens to include the IF-THEN-ELSE or CASE function in place of the (unbounded- or bounded-) mu-operator(s). All these guys are long gone so we can't ask them what is going on. Any help would be appreciated. As it stands now the article is quite incomplete. wvbaileyWvbailey 15:15, 28 May 2007 (UTC)