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<a name="Raw-Material"></a>
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<a name="Raw-Material-1"></a>
<h2 class="section">2.1 Raw Material</h2>

<p>The purpose of this section is to instill some basic concepts about the
way information is stored or communicated by the virtual machine, which
may be necessary for an understanding of subsequent sections.
</p>
<p>The virtual machine represents both programs and data as members of a
semantic domain that is straightforward to describe. Lisp users and
functional programmers may recognize familiar concepts of atoms and
<a name="index-lists"></a>
lists in this description. However, these terms are avoided for the
moment, in order to keep this presentation self contained and to prevent
knowledgeable readers from inferring any unintended meanings.
</p>
<p>As a rule, it is preferable to avoid overspecifying any theoretical
artifact.  In this spirit, the set of entities with which the virtual
machine is concerned can be defined purely in terms of the properties we
need it to have.
</p>
<dl compact="compact">
<dt> <em>A distinguished element</em></dt>
<dd><p>A particular element of the set is designated, arbitrarily or otherwise,
as a distinguished element. Given any element of the set, it is
always possible to decide whether or not it is the distinguished
element. The set is non-empty and such an element exists.
</p></dd>
<dt> <em>A binary operator</em></dt>
<dd><p>A map from pairs of elements of the set to elements of the set exists
and meets these conditions.
</p>
<ul>
<li> It associates a <em>unique</em> element of the set with any given
ordered pair of elements from the set.
</li><li> It does not associate the distinguished element with any pair of elements.
</li></ul>
</dd>
</dl>

<p>For the sake of concreteness, an additional constraint is needed:
<em>the set has no proper subset satisfying the above conditions</em>. Any
number of constructions remain within these criteria, but there is no
need to restrict them further, because they are all equivalent for our
purposes.
</p>
<p>To see that these properties provide all the structure we need for
general purpose computation, we may suppose some given set <code>S</code> and
an operator <code>cons</code> having them are fixed, and infer the following
points.
</p>
<ul>
<li> <code>S</code> contains at least one element, the distinguished
element. Call it <code>nil</code>.
<a name="index-nil"></a>
</li><li> The pair <code>(nil,nil)</code> is a pair of
elements of <code>S</code>, so there must be an element of <code>S</code> that
<code>cons</code> associates with it. We can denote this element
<code>cons(nil,nil)</code>.
<a name="index-cons"></a>
</li><li> As no pair of elements is associated with the
distinguished element, <code>cons(nil,nil)</code> must differ from <code>nil</code>, so
<code>S</code> contains at least two distinct elements.
</li><li> The pair <code>(nil,cons(nil,nil))</code> therefore differs from <code>(nil,nil)</code>,
but because it is yet another pair of elements from <code>S</code>, there
must be an element associated with it by the operator. We can denote
this element as <code>cons(nil,cons(nil,nil))</code>.
</li><li> Inasmuch as the operator
associates every pair of elements with a <em>unique</em> element,
<code>cons(nil,cons(nil,nil))</code> must differ from the element associated
with any other pair of elements, so it must differ from
<code>cons(nil,nil)</code>, and we conclude that <code>nil</code>,
<code>cons(nil,nil)</code> and <code>cons(nil,cons(nil,nil))</code> constitute three
distinct elements of the set <code>S</code>.
</li><li> By defining <code>cons(cons(nil,nil),nil)</code>
and <code>cons(cons(nil,nil),cons(nil,nil))</code> analogously and following a
similar line of reasoning, one may establish the existence of two more
distinct elements of <code>S</code>.
</li></ul>

<p>It is not difficult to see that an argument in more general terms could
show that the inclusion of infinitely many elements in <code>S</code> is
mandated by the properties of the <code>cons</code> operator. Furthermore,
every element of <code>S</code> other than <code>nil</code> owes its inclusion to
being associated with some other pair of elements by <code>cons</code>,
because if it were not, its exclusion would permit a proper subset of
<code>S</code> to meet all of the above conditions. We can conclude that
<code>S</code> contains exactly <code>nil</code> and the countable infinitude of
elements of the form <code>cons(x,y)</code>, where <code>x</code> and <code>y</code> are
either <code>nil</code> or something of the form <code>cons(&hellip;)</code> themselves.
</p>
<p>Some specific examples of sets and operators that have the required
properties are as follows.
</p>
<ul>
<li> the set of natural numbers, with <code>0</code> as the distinguished element,
and the <code>cons</code> operator defined by <code>cons(<var>x</var>,<var>y</var>) =
((<var>x</var>+<var>y</var>)(<var>x</var>+<var>y</var>+1))/2 + <var>y</var> + 1</code>
</li><li> a set of balanced strings of parentheses, with <code>()</code> as the
distinguished element, and <code>cons</code> defined as string concatenation
followed by enclosure in parentheses
</li><li> a set of ordered binary trees, with the empty tree as the distinguished
element, and the <code>cons</code> operator as that which takes an ordered
pair of trees to the tree having them as its descendents
</li><li> a set containing only its own Cartesian product and an arbitrary
but fixed element <code>nil</code>, with <code>cons</code> being the identity
function
</li></ul>

<p>Each of these models may suggest a different implementation, some of which
are more practical than others. The remainder of this document is
phrased somewhat imprecisely in terms of a combination of the latter
two. The nature of the set in question is not considered further, and
elements of the set are described as &ldquo;trees&rdquo; or &ldquo;lists&rdquo;. The
<a name="index-trees"></a>
<a name="index-lists-1"></a>
distinguished element is denoted by <code>nil</code> and the operator by
<code>cons</code>. Where no ambiguity results, <code>cons(x,y)</code> may be written
simply as <code>(x,y)</code>.  These terms should not be seen as constraints
on the implementation.
</p>
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