Re: [OFFTOPIC] Re: Appending lists

[Arthur Miller]

Stefan Monnier via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor
<help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:

>>>>> Just to show that you should never say never:
>>>> Hey, that's cheating :-)
>>> Impredicativity is borderline, indeed.
>> Impredicativity, what's that, recursion?
>
> (with-lecture-mode
>
> Kind of, except the cycle is not "definition refers to itself" (the
> "traditional" form of recursion) but rather "definition can be applied
> to itself" as in the first sentence quoted above ;-)
>
> These forms of circularity have been a great source of hilarity for
> logicians and philosophers over the years, but more relevantly for
> programmers they've been the source of the invention of the notion of
> "type", introduced by Bertrand Russel about a century ago to try and
> rule out those forms of circularity by stratifying logical
> statements.                                                        )

Can you anyhow apply type theory to a definition of time, without refering
to time itself?

//arthur -- in some philosophical doubts