Re: [stack] Why! a concatenative language ?

eas lab <[email protected]> wrote:
> Well one of the most obvious reasons to want to manipulate
> algebraically, must be to prove correctness.

If I understand you correctly, I agree.

> So where's the literature with examples ?

I'd absolutely love to point you to a huge stack of literature with
examples and proofs. Unfortunately, all we have is a small stack, with
much of it written by people on this list. The reason is that the idea
of a "concatenative language" is almost brand new.

Manfred's Joy page will get you off to a good start. There's a lot of
it -- pick and choose what seems fun.
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/philosophy/phimvt/joy.html

Also read Kerby's exploration of combinator logic.
http://tunes.org/~iepos/joy.html

Next a little something done by someone outside of our group: Henry
Baker's excellent set of articles on "linear logic". Be sure to read
ForthStack.html ("The Forth Shall be First") -- but all these papers
are interesting.
http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/

There's actually a lot more, depending on what you need and can
understand; the archives of this group will show you as well as I
could.

> I don't expect to find the 'magic bullet' just some tools to help
> improve productivity and reliability.

They're not here yet. The best thing you could do is help us produce
those tools. The second best is to help us figure out what those tools
would be like -- start talking :-)!

The Factor people are the farthest ahead in this respect. Cat is being
worked on, and I think it'll be very significant. Enchilada contains
some major advances as well. Forth has had the longest time of any
language here, so it's got a lot of tools and techniques, but there's
no unified theory behind any of them (aside from Chuck Moore's
intuition, which is not to be disrespected).

As far as IDEs go... I don't know much about that. It would be nice to
have an IDE designer here, but this isn't a language specific group,
so that's unlikely to happen. I'm sure Factor has a good IDE, since it
was written by Slava (of JEdit fame). I happen to like the minimalist
IDE of colorForth, but I doubt most people would (and even I would be
happy with more bells and whistles on that, but even there it's a fine
start).

> == Chris Glur.

-Billy