has to come from a subsequent re-invocation of the function.
-Let's think about how we should detect that the term has been reduced as far as we can take it. In the substitute-and-repeat interpreter Chris demonstrated for combinatory logic, we had the `reduce_if_redex` function perform a single reduction *if it could*, and then it was up to the caller to compare the result to the original term to see whether any reduction took place. That worked for the example we had. But it has some disadvantages. One is that it's inefficient. Another is that it's sensitive to the idiosyncrasies of how your programming language handles equality comparisons on complex structures; and these details turn out to be very complex and vary from language to language (and even across different versions of different implementations of a single language). We'd be glad to discuss these subtleties offline, but if you're not prepared to master them, it would be smart to foster an ingrained hesitation to blindly applying a language's `=` operator to complex structures. (Some problem cases: large numbers, set structures, structures that contain functions.) A third difficulty is that it's sensitive to the particular combinators we took as basic. With `S` and `K` and `I`, it can never happen that a term has been reduced, but the output is identical to the input. That can happen in the lambda calculus, though (remember `ω ω`); and it can happen in combinatory logic if other terms are chosen as primitive (`W W1 W2` reduces to `W1 W2 W2`, so let them all just be plain `W`s).
+Let's think about how we should detect that the term has been reduced as far as we can take it. In the substitute-and-repeat interpreter Chris demonstrated for combinatory logic, we had the `reduce_if_redex` function perform a single reduction *if it could*, and then it was up to the caller to compare the result to the original term to see whether any reduction took place. That worked for the example we had. But it has some disadvantages. One is that it's inefficient. Another is that it's sensitive to the idiosyncrasies of how your programming language handles equality comparisons on complex structures; and these details turn out to be very complex and vary from language to language (and even across different versions of different implementations of a single language). We'd be glad to discuss these subtleties offline, but if you're not prepared to master them, it would be smart to foster an ingrained hesitation to blindly applying a language's `=` operator to complex structures. (Some problem cases: large numbers, set structures, structures that contain functions, cyclic structures.) A third difficulty is that it's sensitive to the particular combinators we took as basic. With `S` and `K` and `I`, it can never happen that a term has been reduced, but the output is identical to the input. That can happen in the lambda calculus, though (remember `ω ω`); and it can happen in combinatory logic if other terms are chosen as primitive (`W W1 W2` reduces to `W1 W2 W2`, so let them all just be plain `W`s).
So let's consider different strategies for how to detect that the term cannot be reduced any further. One possibility is to write a function that traverses the term ahead of time, and just reports whether it's already a result, without trying to perform any reductions itself. Another strategy is to "raise an exception" or error when we ask the `reduce_head_once` function to reduce an irreducible term; then we can use OCaml's error-handling facilities to "catch" the error at an earlier point in our code and we'll know then that we're finished. Pierce's code used a mix of these two strategies.
This makes sure to substitute the replacement for any free occurrences of `Var ident` in the original, renaming bound variables in the original as needed so that no terms free in the replacement become captured by binding `Lambda`s or `Let`s in the original. This function is tricky to write correctly; so we supplied it for you.
-However, one of the helper functions that *it* calls is `free_in (ident : identifier) (term : term) : bool`, and this was a function that you did [[write for an earlier homework|/exercises/assignment5/#occurs_free]]. Hence we asked you to adapt your implementation of that to the term datatype used in this interpreter. Here is a skeleton of this function:
+However, one of the helper functions that *it* calls is `free_in (ident : identifier) (term : term) : bool`, and this was a function that you did [[write for an earlier homework|/exercises/assignment5-6#occurs_free]]. Hence we asked you to adapt your implementation of that to the term datatype used in this interpreter. Here is a skeleton of this function:
let rec free_in (ident : identifier) (term : term) : bool =
match term with
Getting, reading, and compiling the source code
-----------------------------------------------
-You can download the source code for the intepreter [[here|/code/untyped_full-1.6.tgz]]. That link will always give you the latest version. We will update it as we find any issues. Let us know about any difficulties you experience.
+You can download the source code for the intepreter [[here|/code/untyped_full-1.7.tgz]]. That link will always give you the latest version. We will update it as we find any issues. Let us know about any difficulties you experience.
When you unpack the downloaded source code, you will get a folder with the following contents, sorted here by logical order rather than alphabetically.