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

"Christopher Diggins" [email protected] wrote:
> 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.

Any programming language definition is a mapping from syntax to
semantics.  It's impossible to discuss semantics without mentioning
syntax.

> > and the meaning of
> > P Q is the composition of P and Q.

> This might be slightly more general,

The question isn't how general it is, but how correct.  No purely 
syntactic definition can capture a useful, non-trivial notion of 
concatenativity.

> but I don't know what a sentence is (any sequence of terminals?)

Me either.  But it's not a problem -- anything that satisfies the 
definition will do.

-- 
Tom Duff.  (^x.xx)(^x.xx)