Re: [stack] Is this language concatenative?

Michael Nedzelsky <[email protected]> wrote:
> William Tanksley, Jr wrote:
> > Should our definition allow for languages which are
> > perhaps not _entirely_ concatenative, but whose "top layer" is
> > concatenative?

> It seems to me (I can be wrong here),  that already Joy is not _entirely_
> concatenative because of quotation. I think the quotation as basic operation
> has the same status as concatenation.

Very interesting. I've felt that Joy's quotation (which is, of course,
actually a combination of literal lists and function quotation) didn't
fit in quite correctly.

I was able to design a concept I called flatness, which helped me somewhat.

But I think the ability to include program literals is obviously
useful. And there's some use in insuring that the program literals are
in the same (concatenative) language as you're coding it.

So it seems to me that a non-flat concatenative language is still
useful. And I don't see why it should be impossible to define
formally... Especially since we haven't even defined a flat
concatenative language formally. (We seem to have exceptions to every
proposed definition, although IMO several have come very close.)

>  Michael Nedzelsky

-Billy