Re: [stack] Re: So what is a concatenative language?

On 4/29/07, Tom Duff <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The real definition of "concatenative" is semantic: If P and Q are
> sentences in a concatenative language, then so is P Q,

That however is a statement about the syntax. It's hard to not say
something about the syntax.

> and the meaning of
> P Q is the composition of P and Q. Isn't that the definition that Manfred
> uses?

This might be slightly more general, but I don't know what a sentence
is (any sequence of terminals?)

> The definition of "flat" is syntactic, and trickier: a flat concatenative
> language is a concatenative language whose sentencess are all either
> atomic or concatenations of (zero or more) other terms.
>
> This leaves "atomic" undefined. I can't see offhand what a concise
> definition might be.
>
> --
> Tom Duff. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in
> explosives.

- Christopher