Skip to content

Ordinal

Transfinite Zippers

In my previous post, I described an approach for extending multi-stage programming (MSP) to infinity and beyond. We start with a simple computing “machine” M[0] such as the lambda calculus. Each machine M[a] has a successor machine M[a+1] which is capable of building and reasoning about programs from M[a], yielding towers of nested machines. From there, we note that MSP itself can’t be implemented in any such finite M[n], but must exist in some limit machine M[ω], yielding transfinite towers of machines M[a] for each ordinal a.

Transfinite Meta-Programming - Part 2

In Part 1 I attempted to give some intuition for the process of iterating reflection to infinity and beyond: any time we can iterate reflection infinitely, we can reflect on this infinite process. In this post, I’ll be formalizing this notion in a simple programming language, and I recommend reading that last post before this one. Code is linked at the bottom.

Transfinite Meta-Posting - Part 1

In the beginning, I wrote blog posts.

Once I ran out of ideas, I started to write blog posts about my experience writing blog posts. These were my first meta-posts.

As my ego inflated ever larger, I began to post about my meta-posts.

…

  • in Ordinal
  • 6 min read

Plotting Functions on Ordinals

Let’s say we’ve defined a function f from ordinals to ordinals and want to plot it like we might plot a function from integers to integers. We want to line up our ordinals on the x- and y-axes, and plot a point at (x, f(x)) for each ordinal x. Well where should we actually put those ordinals on the axes? This simple question is the topic of this post.