Lately, I was wondering about if it's possible to represent any logic by choosing a suitable base of combinators, and the sentences in the logic would correspond to beta-normal terms expressed in those combinators. What brought me to the idea is that we can represent certain substructural logics using a subset of B, C, K, W. Also, one can represent classical logic by using a different base than S and K, which allows for call/cc.
What would be intriguing, a choice of combinator base such that it could express terms in Church's typed lambda calculus. The composition of combinators would fail to normalize iff the corresponding composed term in typed lambda calculus failed to typecheck.
I think this could lead to somewhat simpler foundations of mathematics, instead of having types and various axioms, we would just say here's a base set of combinators and have fun combining them.
griffzhowl•1h ago
Peter Smith (logic God) also recommends it in his logic study guide:
https://www.logicmatters.net/tyl/