Re: [stack] Concatenative macros?

iepos <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Billy & all,
> It's been a while! Sorry this post is a little belated. I tried
> sending it last week, but something was wrong with my account (my
> concatenative membership had expired, apparently; or maybe the list
> was unmoderated back when I used to use it). In any case, Yahoo ate
> my post up, so I had to rewrite it ...

Thank you for putting the effort in. I have one more question.

> > A doubt begins to stir in my mind. Is the Fokker X combinator
> > actually
> > a pseudo-combinator? If so, is that a problem with the Fokker X
> > combinator, or is it a problem with Kerby's ideas about
> > pseudo-combinators?

> Yes. The Fokker X combinator would be a "pseudo-combinator". But
> that was a bad choice of terminology on my part. Under the standard
> definition, it is a combinator. The restricted objects I was calling
> combinators are what Curry called "proper combinators". So we ought
> to say that the Fokker X combinator is an improper combinator, but a
> combinator nonetheless. To recap, here are the standard definitions
> which I should have used:

Ah! A light dawns. Thank you again. Your definitions make sense.

> But after some fiddling, I was able to find a one-combinator base
> that does work. The idea is to make a combinator with 'cake' and 'k'
> somehow embedded in it, built in such a way that, with a little
> manipulation, we can extract them back out. Let

> z == [zap [cake] [k]] dip i

Nice. Now I'm going to have to try to understand Fokker's paper so I
can try to construct a simpler version. (I'll have to pick a
definition of "simpler".)

Before I fiddle with that, though, I'm going to work on the
two-combinator flat language... That's seriously interesting. To me.

> - Brent

-Billy