[pankajdoharey]

It is entirely possible to realise Lambda calculus using lisp. But McCarthy not understanding it is surprising.

[Isamu]

>McCarthy not understanding it is surprising.

I think he is commenting on the subtleties of it.

I think many reading here will say they understand it or have studied it in a course but I am not so sure everyone gets the subtle points. Myself I have always puzzled over the difference between what programmers call LC and what seems to be discussed by Church.

[ozmaverick72]

I understand that Turing and Church came up with different approaches to describing the fundamentals of computing. You can see there is a relationship between LC and LISP. My question is how did we get to the von Neumann architecture and CPU instruction sets from either Church or Turing's work ?

[lonelappde]

Why? Lambda calculus is based on functions. Lisp supports functions. Both use lambda because that's a known notation for functions.

Lambda calculus can be modeled in lisp. But there are millions of things you can build with Lisp that McCarthy might not know or care about.

[pankajdoharey]

It is not that hard to begin with.

[pdpi]

McCarthy not understanding it at the time