Talk:De Bruijn notation

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An entry from De Bruijn notation appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on March 3, 2007.
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[edit] Polish notation

Near the bottom, this notation is likened to polish notation. According to the wiki page on polish notation, the operator comes before the operands; however, in DeBruijn notation, the operand comes before the operator:

 (M)N

Here, the applicator wagon (M) is the operand and the N is the operator, IIUC. Thus, it appears DeBruijn is like *reverse* polish notation. Am I missing something?

Cppljevans (talk) 15:07, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

That note about Polish notation is probably an irrelevant distraction. To be precise, though, the operator in an application M N is the space separating M and N, which are both operands. A proper Polish notation would have written it as @ M N (or @ N M), where @ represents the application operator. I'll remove the note. Kaustuv Chaudhuri 09:37, 10 June 2008 (UTC)