[FOM] Simple Turing machines, Universality, Encodings, etc.

[Richard Heck]

Vaughan Pratt wrote:
> More recently Manuel Blum (whose advisor *and* spouse are both on the
> present prize committee) and others such as Yiannis Moschovakis in Logic
> Colloquium'69, Sol Feferman in Logic Colloquium'76, and Jens Fensted in
> his 1980 book *General recursion theory: An axiomatic approach*,
> have since the mid-1960s advocated more abstract axioms, e.g.
> by taking certain theorems of recursion theory such as the s-m-n theorem
> as its axioms, in place of the customary listing of basic functions.
>   
Could someone say a few more words about this? I find this idea very 
interesting, but don't know anything about it and don't have easy access 
to any of these papers.

rh