Talk:A-normal form

Bad reference link?

The link to the article in the one and only reference leads to an error page that says that document doesn't exist. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 155.101.224.65 (talk) 14:57, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

What does the 'A' in ANF stand for?

The article was recently moved from administrative normal form to A-normal form, with the following edit summary: ‘The "A" is inspired by Curry's "Axiom Set A" and "Administrative" is incorrect.’ I don't know the original source for the term ‘administrative normal form’ (and it does not appear in the original paper ‘The Essence of Compiling with Continuations’ by Flanagan et al.) but I have seen it used in papers and online discussions for quite some time. One way or the other, could somebody provide a source for the term ‘ANF’ and what it is supposed to expand to? — Tobias Bergemann (talk) 09:12, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Appel calls it Administrative Normal Form in "SSA is functional programming". I couldn't find anything in the (indexes) of Compiling with Continuations and Modern Compiler Implementation. (I don't think the move per se was a bad idea, but this certainly deserves a mention in the lead.) On a side note, this article was created under the name "Administrative Normal Form" by Matt Might. —Ruud 10:56, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't know that Appel had called it that. I understand if you think it would be better to undo the change. Unfortunately the only source I have is personal communication - I'm taking a class from one of the authors of the original paper, Matthias Felleisen, and he said yesterday that the "A" doesn't stand for "administrative" and that the only inspiration for using "A" was that Curry & Feys in Combinatory Logic had labeled a set of axioms A_β. — Erik (talk) 13:52, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Is there any way you could convince him to write this up somewhere? It would certainly be an interesting bit of trivia. —Ruud 13:56, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I for one would prefer to keep the article under its current title ‘A-normal form’. I don't think that would violate the WP:COMMONNAME policy even though the term ‘administrative normal form’ appears to be widely used. — Tobias Bergemann (talk) 14:22, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Unclear wording?

...evaluation of each argument must halt immediately sounds unclear to me. I didn't meet this wording before. Either it is topic specific or standard phrase, I think it deserves clarification. The exposition gives a hint about the meaning of halting immediately, it suggests zero or constant time evaluation, however variable lookup may or may not be constant time depending on the implementation. --Kalmankeri (talk) 14:05, 1 April 2021 (UTC)