Re: [Caml-list] Building large and portable projects

[Martin Berger <martinb@dcs.qmul.ac.uk>]

> Make systems are all conceptually wrong.

agreed.

> This leads to the first novel idea. Fixpoints.
> Interscript is based on that idea.

> A build system does NOT have targets. 

> A build systems has processes and files.
> Lets call the processes ARROWS and the files OBJECTS.

> Oh. That's a category. We allow of course,
> products of files (multiple outputs and inputs)
> and sums of files (choose one of several).
> [And of course we'd better make it cartesian
> closed and allow processes to be files .. 
> called scripts .. :]

this is a fascinating proposal. i have two immediate questions:

* as someone else pointed out, relying on convergence towards
   fixpoints may be too strong. some build processes may
   never converge, rather they evenually stabilise in some
   "open ball", so you might need some (user supplied) notion
   of "close enough". how do you do that?

* according to [1], a cartesian closed category with fixpoints
   and finite sums is equivalent to the category with one object
   and one arrow. how do you deal with this?

martin

[1] Hagen Huwig and Axel Poigne, A note on inconsistencies caused
by fixpoints in a cartesian dosed category, Theoretical Computer
Science 73 (1990), p. 101-112.

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