alt Hacker NewsHave you gone through The Little Schemer?
More on topic:
> No comparable primitive has been known for continuous mathematics: computing elementary functions such as sin, cos, sqrt, and log has always required multiple distinct operations.
I was taught that these were all hypergeometric functions. What distinction is being drawn here?
Hypergeometric functions are functions with 4 parameters.
When you have a function with many parameters it becomes rather trivial to express simpler functions with it.
You could find a lot of functions with 4 parameters that can express all elementary functions.
Finding a binary operation that can do this, like in TFA, is far more difficult, which is why it has not been done before.
A function with 4 parameters can actually express not only any elementary function, but an infinity of functions with 3 parameters, e.g. by using the 4th parameter to encode an identifier for the function that must be computed.